Annie laughed. The sound came out sharp.

“You wanna know why?”

Smoke’s jaw tightened.

“Why I look at you like that.” Her grip tightened around the suitcase handle. “Because the last time I saw you, you acted like you couldn’t wait for me to get the fuck outta Mississippi.”

A murmur moved through the yard.

Smoke’s head jerked back slightly. “What?”

“You heard me.” The tears were coming faster now. “I came to yo’ house so excited to see you.”

She pointed at him. “I was nervous as fuck.” She stepped closer. “But you ain’t even want me there.”

The memory hit her all over again. Standing in that house. Sitting at the kitchen table. Trying to make conversation with him when he felt a million miles away despite being right in front of her.

“You barely talked to me.”

Smoke stared at her. “Annie—”

“No.” Her voice cracked. “You stood most of the time.”

Another step.

“You looked miserable.”

Another.

“You was more interested in whoever called your phone, than talkin’ to me.”

Something flashed across Smoke’s face. 

Memory.

Finally.

“Then I told you I was leavin’.” Her voice dropped. “And all you could say was ‘aight.’”

The yard went silent, because now they weren’t talking about the years after. They were talking about the last day. The last face-to-face meeting.

Annie laughed bitterly. “I said I’d call you.” Her eyes burned. “You ain’t even act like you cared if I did.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t even halfway down them porch steps before you closed the fuckin’ door.”

Smoke just stared at her. 

Then he laughed. 

The sound wasn’t amused. It wasn’t even angry. It sounded exhausted. Like somebody reaching the end of their rope.

“You really believe that delusional shit, huh?”

Annie froze.

Smoke shook his head.

“I sent you letters.”

His voice rose.

“I sent you birthday cards.”

Another step.

“I sent you Christmas cards.”

The hurt was gone now. This was frustration.

Years of it.

“Any fuckin’ thing I could think of to get you to talk to me.”

Smoke pointed at the mixtape still clutched in his hand.

“That mixtape was the last fuckin’ straw.”

Annie’s face faltered.

Smoke kept going. “I put everything I couldn’t say in that muthafucka.” His chest rose sharply. “I told you I loved you in that shit.” 

The words cracked. “Without sayin’ the words.”

Another step.

“And you still gave my ass nothin’.”

Annie stared at him. Confused. Hurt.

Smoke laughed again. Broken this time.

“No call.”

Another breath.

“No letter.”

Another.

“No card.”

His eyes burned. “Nothing.”

The silence stretched tight between them.

Then his face hardened. “And when I finally did talk to yo’ ass?”

Annie felt her stomach drop.

Smoke nodded once. Slow. Deliberate. “You got some nigga laughin’ in the background.”

The entire yard went still. Someone gasped. 

Annie blinked.

“What are you—?”

“You heard me.”

His jaw clenched.

“I called.”

Another breath.

“And some nigga in the background laughin’ while I’m listenin’ feelin’ stupid as fuck.”

Recognition flickered across Annie’s face.

Finally.

Because he’d been carrying that one for years.

“How the fuck you think that felt, huh?”

Annie opened her mouth. “Elijah…”

Smoke shook his head. 

Then finally answered the question she’d been asking this entire time. The one underneath everything else. The one about why he hadn’t begged.

Why he hadn’t chased. 

Why he hadn’t stopped her.

His voice dropped. Dangerously quiet.

“You wanted me to tell you to stay?”

Annie’s eyes filled with tears instantly.

Smoke nodded.

“You wanted me to tell you not to go?”

The hurt surfaced one final time. 

Raw. 

Unprotected.

“How was I to fight for you when I already thought you was gone?”

The words landed between them with enough force to steal the air from her lungs. 

For the first time since she stepped back into Mississippi, Annie realized something she had never considered.

The last time she saw Elijah Moore, he wasn’t sitting across that kitchen thinking she was leaving.

He was sitting there thinking she had already left.

Jada couldn’t remember the last time she felt this invisible.

The strange part was that neither of them had forgotten she was there.

Annie had looked directly at her. Smoke had answered questions about her. Her name had been spoken more than once since this conversation started.

Yet standing here now, she had the uncomfortable feeling that she was watching something that had started years before she arrived and would continue long after she left.

Around them, the cookout had faded into background noise. Not literally. Mrs. Jones still stood beside the grill. The dominoes game remained abandoned. Children still tore through the yard with water guns while somebody’s uncle argued about football loud enough for half the neighborhood to hear.

But none of it seemed to matter to the two people standing in the middle of the yard.

They had stopped talking about her several minutes ago.

Maybe they had never really been talking about her at all.

The thought settled uneasily in her chest.

She had spent the last year believing she understood what existed between her and Smoke. He hadn’t promised her anything. If anything, he had been frustratingly honest from the beginning. He wasn’t looking for a relationship. He wasn’t making promises. More than once he had told her she deserved somebody capable of giving her more than he could.

At the time, she thought he was protecting himself.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

Now she stood here listening to Annie talk about North Carolina and loneliness and missing Smoke, and for the first time Jada found herself wondering if she had misunderstood the entire situation from the beginning.

Because whatever this was, it didn’t feel unfinished.

It felt… interrupted.

To make it worse she heard him say—

“I thought you knew how much I fuckin’ love you.”

She felt the sentence before she fully understood it.

Her mind tried to correct what he had said. Tried to bend the words into something easier to survive. Loved. Had loved. Used to love. Any version that belonged safely in the past, where old heartbreaks and high school memories were supposed to stay. But Smoke hadn’t said it that way. He stood in the middle of Mrs. Jones’ yard with his voice cracked open, eyes fixed on Annie like nobody else existed, and said he loved her in the present tense.

Love.

It wasn’t nostalgia, regret or some unfinished thing he had outgrown, but never properly buried. Love. The kind of word Jada had spent the last year trying not to ask for because she already knew better. The kind of word Smoke had never offered her, not even accidentally, not even in one of their after-midnight moments when sometimes people said more than they meant to. He had been kind to her. Honest with her. Careful in his own way. But he had never been open. 

Not like this. 

Not exposed in front of half the town with his pride bleeding out at Annie’s feet.

The pieces came together slowly at first, then all at once. Every dinner made sense. The silence after Annie’s name came up. Every conversation he ended before it could become something more. 

Every moment she had mistaken for progress suddenly looked different.

She had spent a year telling herself Smoke was guarded, emotionally unavailable, too damaged by whatever had happened back then to let anybody all the way in. Standing here now, watching him look at Annie like the last eight years had never been able to touch the deepest part of him, Jada understood the truth with a humiliation so quiet it almost felt private.

He hadn’t been unavailable.

He was just unavailable to her.

She looked at Annie then, really looked at her. Tears were coming down her face so freely now that she didn’t seem aware of them anymore. The suitcase was still in her hand, though her grip had gone slack around the handle. She looked wrecked. Angry. Drunk enough to say too much and sober enough to feel every bit of it. Jada wanted to hate her for standing there holding the one thing Jada had spent years hoping for. But the anger wouldn’t hold the way it used to. Not now. Not while Annie looked like she had been bleeding from the same wound all along.

Then she looked at Smoke.

He wasn’t watching the crowd. Not Stack, Pearline, Mary or the dominoes table that had gone still behind him. 

He wasn’t even watching her.

The thought settled strangely in her chest because, despite everything, she knew things about Smoke. She knew how he took his coffee. Knew what kind of music he listened to when he thought nobody was paying attention. 

But standing here now, she found herself seeing how much of him had always remained just out of reach.

She knew his real name.

She had just used it not even an hour prior.

But standing here now, she realized there was a difference between knowing a name and belonging to it.

To most people he was Smoke. Even when they called him Elijah, it sounded like a substitute. A government name. Something official.

Annie said it differently.

Elijah when she was angry. Elijah when she was crying. Elijah when she wanted him to understand exactly how much he had hurt her.

And every single time she said it, his attention sharpened.

Friends had called him Elijah before. His family certainly had. But Jada couldn’t remember ever hearing another person say it and have him answer it so completely.

The realization settled quietly.

The name didn’t belong to Annie.

But somehow, the version of him that answered to it always had.

He was looking at Annie the same way he had looked past Jada in that parking lot freshman year. The same way he had looked every time Jada convinced herself she was imagining it, because the alternative meant admitting there had never really been a contest.

That was the part that finally settled.

There had never been a contest.

She had spent years wondering what Annie had that she didn’t. Beauty, softness, ease, some invisible thing people seemed to recognize before she could name it. She had treated the question like something she could solve if she studied it long enough. As though understanding Annie would somehow teach her how to be chosen over her. But standing there with Smoke’s confession still hanging in the humid air, she realized the question had always been wrong.

It was never about what Annie had.

It was Annie.

It had always been Annie.

Standing in Mrs. Jones’s backyard, listening to Smoke confess a love he never stopped carrying, she finally understood.

It was Annie then.

It was still Annie now.

Stack should have felt surprised.

Instead, he felt like somebody had finally handed him the missing pages of a story he’d been trying to understand for years.

Around him, nobody was pretending to mind their business anymore.

Aunt Cheryl had abandoned the grill entirely. The tongs she’d been carrying were long gone now, forgotten somewhere behind her. Uncle Lewis stood beside her with his arms folded across his chest, his expression unreadable beneath the evening light. Geneva and Max had drifted closer too. Even the dominoes game had dissolved. The men still sat around the table, but nobody was touching the tiles. The entire yard seemed suspended between one moment and the next, waiting to see what would happen.

He barely noticed any of it.

His attention remained fixed on Annie and Smoke.

For the first time since Annie came home, Smoke and Annie were finally talking. Really talking. Not the careful conversations they’d been having for the last two days or the polite versions of themselves they showed everybody else. 

This was the ugly shit. The buried shit. Shit both of them should’ve said years ago, but never did.

Then Smoke said it.

“When I finally talked to yo’ ass, I heard some nigga in the background laughin’.”

The words settled over the yard.

He felt something click into place. He didn’t know exactly what Smoke was talking about, but suddenly he understood something he hadn’t understood in years.

Back then, he’d known something happened. He just never knew what.

After Annie moved to North Carolina, Smoke had still talked about her at first. Not constantly. That wasn’t his style. But enough. Enough that he knew she stayed on his mind. Then one day it seemed like somebody flipped a switch.

Smoke stopped bringing her up. He wasn’t checking the mailbox on the regular. And he stopped looking at the phone every time it rang.

The change hadn’t happened at once. It was slow enough that most wouldn’t have noticed it. 

But he did.

They were sitting on the back patio steps one evening when he’d finally gotten tired of pretending not to know something was wrong.

“What happened wit’ Annie?”

Smoke didn’t answer. He’d kept staring out into the yard like he hadn’t heard the question.

“Nothin’.”

“C’mon bruh.”

A long silence followed.

Then Smoke finally spoke. “Me and Annie done.”

Stack remembered waiting for more. An explanation. A reason.

Anything.

None came.

Smoke stood, flicked his cigarette into the dirt, and walked inside.

That had been the end of it.

Every time Stack tried bringing Annie up afterward, the conversation died before it started. Smoke changed the subject. Left the room. Found something else to do. Looking back, Stack realized he hadn’t been protecting a secret.

He’d been protecting a wound.

Standing in Aunt Cheryl’s backyard now, listening to eight years of misunderstandings unravel in real time, he finally knew what he’d been looking at back then.

Smoke hadn’t stopped talking because he stopped caring. He stopped talking because something convinced him Annie was already gone.

The knowledge of this sat heavy. He watched the two of them. Shit, the whole reason he’d pushed Annie to come over that last time she was in town was because he’d been hoping they would talk. 

He remembered practically forcing the issue. Telling her to stop being scary and come through. Watching her walk into the house carrying that overnight bag. Watching Smoke look up when she stepped through the door. Then leaving because he’d thought privacy was all they needed.

Now he wanted to go back in time and knock both of them upside the fucking head.

Apparently they’d spent the entire visit doing exactly what they were doing before now—avoiding conversations that mattered.

Annie thought Smoke had sent her a goodbye.

Smoke thought Annie had moved on.

Neither one of them said any of it.

Stack looked towards Pearline.

She stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest, her face still carrying traces of the argument she’d had upstairs. If there was anybody in the yard having a worse day than Annie and Smoke, it was probably her.

Between Annie cussing her out and Mary standing twenty feet away pretending she hadn’t started half this bullshit, Pearline was already hanging on by a thread. Add in the fact that Mary had slept with Stack while she and Stack were still trying to figure out whatever the hell they were becoming, and Pearline looked one inconvenience away from committing a felony.

Despite everything else going on, they both seemed to arrive at the same conclusion at exactly the same time.

These two had spent eight years makin’ themselves miserable when all they had to do was open their muthafuckin’ mouths and talk.

Annie stared at him.

For several seconds, she couldn’t make herself respond. Not because she had nothing to say, but because too many things arrived at once and crowded her throat before any one of them could become words. The heat in her face sharpened into something closer to embarrassment, then anger, then disbelief. She could see him standing there at eighteen with the phone pressed to his ear, hearing some boy laugh somewhere behind her and deciding the worst possible thing because hurt people were good at doing that. 

She could see it. That was the problem. She could finally see it, and seeing it didn’t make her less angry.

“That was probably somebody from class,” she said, her voice rough from crying. “I don’t know, Elijah. I had people around me.”

Smoke laughed once, and the sound cut through what little softness had tried to form between them. “Of course you did.”

Annie’s eyes narrowed. “What the fuck that supposed to mean?”

“It mean exactly what it sound like.” 

His grip tightened around the mixtape without him seeming to realize it. 

“I been standin’ here listenin’ to you tell me what you thought, what you felt, what you needed, like I was supposed to know all that from three states away when half the time I couldn’t even get you on the fuckin’ phone. I tried everything I could think of just to get you to talk to me. And you still gave me your ass to kiss.”

The words hit hard enough to make someone in the crowd inhale sharply. 

Annie felt the force of them too, but pride rose before hurt could fully show. It crawled up her spine and locked her shoulders in place, the same stubbornness that had carried her through years of pretending she hadn’t spent half her life missing him. 

Across the yard, Pearline’s face tightened like she already knew Annie was about to say something she would regret. 

Maybe she did. Maybe everyone did. Maybe that’s why she started moving towards Annie.

Smoke kept going, his voice lower now but no less dangerous. “So yeah, when I finally heard yo’ voice and some nigga was in the background laughin’ like he had a reason to be comfortable around you, I was done. By the time you came to my house, I already thought you was gone. Hell yeah I was distant. Hell yeah I didn’t know what to say. What the fuck you expect me to do, Annie? Sit there and beg you to stay after you had spent months showin’ me you ain’t wanna be kept?”

Annie flinched before she could stop herself.

The reaction crossed Smoke’s face quickly. Satisfaction didn’t follow it. If anything, he looked worse for having said it. 

Tired. 

Angry. 

Hurt enough to keep swinging because stopping would mean feeling the full weight of what he had just admitted in front of everybody.

“That’s what you thought?” Annie asked.

“What else was I supposed to think?”

“You could’ve asked me.”

Smoke’s laugh was sharp. “Oh, you would’ve answered this time?”

The words landed exactly where he aimed them. 

Annie’s mouth parted, but nothing came out at first. 

Around them, the yard seemed to draw even closer. Aunt Cheryl had moved off to the side of them, Uncle Lewis beside her with a hand hovering near her elbow like he was not sure whether to hold her back or follow her in. Geneva and Aunt Max stood just behind them, their faces set with the kind of concern that understood this was no longer simply messy. 

This was two people cutting each other because bleeding alone had stopped feeling fair.

Annie swallowed hard, but her pride would not let her lower her voice. “Sorry,” she said, the word brittle enough to break. “I forgot who I was talkin’ to.”

Smoke’s eyes darkened. “What that mean?”

She laughed, and it came out uglier than she intended. “Mr. Talkative. My fault. I forgot I was supposed to read your mind and listen to a mixtape wit’ no note, no explanation, no call, no nothin’, and somehow understand everything you were too fuckin’ scared to say out loud.”

Stack’s hand came up toward his face, not quite covering his eyes but close enough. Pearline closed hers. Mary, who had been chewing on the inside of her cheek so hard she looked like she might draw blood, went completely still. Even Jada seemed to wince, though whether it was for Annie or Smoke, nobody could tell.

Smoke stared at Annie like she had reached over and put her hand directly on an old bruise.

“You wanna talk about that day at my house?” he asked.

Annie lifted her chin. “I been talkin’ about it.”

“Nah.” Smoke shook his head once, slow and controlled. “You been talkin’ about what you decided it was. You walked in there already thinkin’ I had moved on, and everything I did after that, you made it fit.”

Her eyes flashed. “And you didn’t?”

The question stopped him for a moment, just long enough for Annie to see that it landed. She stepped closer before she could think better of it, the suitcase forgotten at her side, the tequila still moving through her blood in warm, reckless waves.

“You stood there lookin’ at your phone,” she said. “That’s what you were doin’ while I was sittin’ there feelin’ stupid. So since we talkin’ about assumptions, what was I supposed to think? You thought I moved on, you did too?”

Smoke’s jaw clenched. “That wasn’t—”

“Wasn’t, what, Smoke?” she cut in.

The name landed wrong.

Everybody felt it.

Smoke’s face changed immediately, the anger tightening into something sharper because she knew exactly what she had done. She always called him Elijah, and today dragging his real name out of him with every accusation and every confession, and now she had put Smoke between them like a door slamming shut.

Annie saw the reaction and kept going anyway.

“That your phone wasn’t blowin’ up? That you wasn’t waitin’ on somebody else to call? What, you was fuckin’ Jada back then too? Couldn’t wait to call her pick-me ass once I left?”

Mary choked on whatever was in her cup. It came out half cough, half strangled laugh, and Aunt Max shot her a look sharp enough to cut. Jada’s face went completely still, all the earlier humiliation hardening into something colder as she looked from Annie to Smoke and back again. She didn’t smirk. She didn’t defend herself. She only shook her head once, small and tired, like even she knew this had stopped being about her a long time ago and somehow Annie had dragged her back into it anyway.

Smoke’s voice dropped. “That was my boss.”

Annie blinked.

Smoke took a step closer. “That phone you keep talkin’ about? That was my boss tellin’ me what job site to be at the next mornin’.”

For one humiliating instant, Annie felt the ground quake under her. She saw the kitchen again. Smoke glancing at the phone. Her stomach twisting. Her mind building a whole story out of one look because she had been scared enough to believe almost anything by then. The obviousness of it should have made her quiet. 

Instead, pride rushed in to save her from the shame.

“Sure, Smoke.”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t do that.”

“The way you looked at that phone wasn’t no damn job site look.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that nigga was just a classmate?” Smoke fired back, his voice rising again. “Not with the way he was laughin’. Not with that little ‘oh, Annie’ shit in the background like he knew somethin’ I didn’t.”

Recognition flashed across her face before she could hide it.

Smoke caught it.

“Yeah,” he said, the word rough. “I remember that part too.”

Annie’s stomach tightened because now she remembered it clearly enough to hate how messy memory could be. A study group. Somebody joking around. A boy from class who had been harmless and annoying and nowhere near important enough to have shaped eight years of pain. She couldn’t even remember his name. Could barely remember his face. 

Yet here Elijah stood, holding onto his laugh like evidence.

“Again…you could’ve asked,” she said through clenched teeth.

Smoke’s laugh came fast and mean. “Again… you would’ve answered?”

The yard flinched with her.

Annie took a step toward him, anger burning through the embarrassment now. “Maybe if you learned how to open your fuckin’ mouth instead of sittin’ around actin’ like silence make you deep, we wouldn’t be here.”

Stack moved before anyone else did. Not fully between them yet, but closer. Pearline reached for Annie at the same time, her hand closing around her arm just above the elbow.

“Annie,” Pearline warned softly.

Annie snatched her arm back without looking at her. “No, don’t Annie me. Everybody wanna talk now, right? Everybody got all this shit to say now.”

Smoke stepped forward too, and Stack’s hand landed flat against his chest.

“Back up,” Stack muttered.

Smoke didn’t look at him. “Move.”

“Nah, back up bruh.”

Aunt Cheryl finally stepped into the center of it, and though her voice was not loud, it carried across the yard with enough force to cut through the shouting. 

“ENOUGH.”

Nobody moved at first.

She looked at Annie, then at Smoke, and the disappointment in her face somehow made both of them look younger. “Y’all are bein’ real damn silly right now, and I know both of y’all got more sense than this.”

Annie’s chest rose and fell too quickly. “I’m leaving.”

“Baby, don’t walk outta here like this,” Aunt Cheryl said.

“I said I’m leaving.”

“You hear me talkin’ to you?”

Annie looked away because if she looked at Aunt Cheryl too long, she might break in a way anger could not hide. “I can’t be here.”

Smoke laughed under his breath, and the sound made something in her snap before he even spoke.

“Go on then.”

The yard went still.

Stack’s head turned sharply toward his brother. “Smoke.”

Smoke ignored him, his eyes locked on Annie. “Run away like you always do. That’s what you good at anyway.”

The words hit harder than anything else he had said, maybe because this one was not about old phone calls or letters or a mixtape or some boy laughing in the background. This one was about her. About the pattern he believed he knew. 

About the thing she feared might be true.

Annie moved before she thought.

Pearline caught her around the waist just as Stack caught Smoke by the shoulders.

“Let me go,” Annie snapped.

“No,” Pearline said, voice shaking now. “No, you not doin’ this.”

Smoke tried to shrug Stack off. “Get off me.”

“Bruh, chill the fuck out,” Stack said, tightening his grip. “Both of y’all look stupid.”

The whole yard had shifted into motion now. Aunt Cheryl was yelling for everybody to back up. Uncle Lewis stepped between two cousins trying to get closer. Geneva had one hand pressed to her mouth while Aunt Max kept saying Annie’s name like repetition might bring her back to herself. 

Cornbread stood near the edge of the yard with Therise tucked behind him, his eyes moving between Smoke and anyone who looked like they might be foolish enough to step in wrong. Bo hovered near the dominoes table, uncertain whether to help or stay out of grown folks’ business. Mike and Isoo stood a little farther away with Grace beside them, all three looking like they had accidentally wandered into the part of a family gathering nobody was supposed to see.

Then Annie saw Isoo.

It happened fast enough that nobody could stop it and slow enough that everybody understood what she was doing.

Her eyes found him across the yard, and the expression on her face changed. It wasn’t soft or calm. Her expression changed into something petty, wounded, and desperate to regain control of a situation that had stripped her bare in front of all the people she knew.

“Isoo.”

Smoke went still in Stack’s arms.

Pearline’s grip tightened around Annie immediately. “Annie, don’t.”

Isoo looked caught off guard at first. Then he straightened, his gaze flicking from Annie to Smoke and back again. “Uhh, yeah?”

Annie wiped her face with the back of her hand, still breathing too hard. “Will you get me outta here? I don’t wanna be here no more.”

A low sound moved through the yard.

Smoke’s entire body moved forward, but Stack shoved him back hard enough to make him stumble a half step.

“Don’t,” Stack said.

Smoke’s eyes never left Annie. “You serious?”

Annie looked directly at him when she answered. “Yeah.”

Pearline turned her slightly, trying to make Annie look at her instead. “Please don’t do this. Not like this.”

Aunt Cheryl stepped closer. “Annie, baby, you makin’ a mistake.”

“I already made plenty today.”

“Then don’t make another one,” Geneva said, her voice gentle but firm.

Annie heard them. She did. Somewhere underneath the hurt and the tequila and the humiliation, she heard every warning being offered to her. But hearing was not the same as stopping. Not when Smoke was still looking at her like he had been right about her all along. 

Not when the word run was still sitting in the air between them.

Isoo took a cautious step forward.

Mike immediately caught his arm. “Bro, don’t do it.”

Isoo looked at him. “She don’t wanna be here, Mike.”

“I said don’t do it.”

“She asked me for a ride.”

Mike’s expression tightened because everybody knew it was more than that. Annie knew it too. So did Isoo. So did Smoke. The entire yard could see it, which only made it worse.

Smoke shoved Stack’s hands off him hard enough this time that Stack had to step in front of him fully. “Annie, you don’t gotta leave. I’ll go.”

The words should have softened something.

They did.

For a second.

Then Isoo spoke.

“She said she don’t wanna be here, Smoke. Let her go.”

Smoke turned his head slowly.

The yard seemed to feel the change before anybody moved. Stack’s hand went back to Smoke’s chest. Mike stepped in front of Isoo. Aunt Cheryl said Smoke’s name in a voice that should have stopped him.

It did not.

Isoo stepped around Mike and lifted his chin just enough to make the whole thing worse. “You done said enough to her.”

Smoke moved so fast Stack barely managed to get a hand on him.

It slowed the first step.

It didn’t stop the second.

The punch landed with a sick, clean sound that cut through the entire yard. Isoo stumbled backward into Mike, one hand flying to his mouth as Grace screamed and Cornbread cursed loud enough to shake the trees. 

Everything exploded at once. 

Stack grabbed Smoke from behind, dragging him back with both arms locked around his chest. Mike shoved Isoo behind him while Bo and Cornbread rushed forward. Aunt Cheryl’s voice rose above everybody else, furious and heartbroken all at once, but Annie barely heard it.

Annie stood frozen with Pearline’s arms still around her.

Because a minute ago she had wanted to leave.

A minute ago she had wanted to hurt him.

A minute ago she had wanted to prove she could walk away first.

Now Elijah stood several feet away, breathing hard, eyes still locked on hers while half the yard tried to keep him from doing something worse, and Annie realized with a sick, sinking feeling that the thing between them had not broken open.

It had finally broken all the way loose.

Stack didn’t stop walking until they were well past the edge of the cookout.

The music still carried through the trees, muffled now by distance. Every so often laughter drifted across the yard, strange and out of place after everything that had just happened. The farther they moved from the crowd, the easier it became to pretend the entire scene had happened somewhere else.

Smoke knew better.

His jaw still ached from how hard he’d been clenching it. His knuckles hurt too. Every few steps he flexed his hand without realizing it, the sting settling deeper each time.

Neither brother spoke.

Not at first.

The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable. It rarely was. Most people expected twins to talk constantly. Stack and Smoke had never needed to. Half the time they communicated through looks, shrugs, or the simple understanding that came from spending an entire lifetime beside somebody.

They stopped beneath the old pecan tree near the edge of the property.

The same tree they’d hidden behind as kids whenever Aunt Cheryl started handing out chores.

Smoke leaned against the trunk of the tree and reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

The movement felt automatic. Familiar. Something to do with his hands while his head tried and failed to catch up with everything that had happened over the last hour. His fingers found the pack easily enough, but when he reached for the lighter, the tremor hit immediately. Not enough for most people to notice. Enough for Stack.

The wheel clicked beneath his thumb.

Nothing.

Smoke frowned and tried again. This time a flame appeared before sputtering out. “Fuck,” he cursed under his breath as frustration tightened his jaw. Before he could try a third time, the lighter disappeared from his hand altogether.

He looked up.

Stack stood there holding it.

Neither brother acknowledged what had just happened. They didn’t need to. Stack flicked the wheel once and a steady flame appeared immediately. Smoke leaned forward, lit the cigarette, and took a long drag. The burn settled harshly in his lungs, but it gave him something to focus on besides the image of Annie standing in the middle of Aunt Cheryl’s yard with tears on her face, fire in her eyes, and a suitcase in her hand.

For a while neither of them spoke. The sounds of the cookout drifted through the trees in pieces. Somebody shouted something that earned a chorus of responses. Music floated lazily through the humid evening air. Life was already trying to move on from the scene they had left behind.

Smoke wasn’t.

His attention kept drifting toward the house. The porch. The front yard. The windows upstairs. Anywhere Annie might appear.

Stack followed his brother’s gaze and immediately understood what he was looking for.

Or rather who.

It sat heavily on his chest. Even after the argument, after the screaming. And even after the punch. Smoke was still checking to see if Annie had left.

Again.

Stack rubbed a hand across his jaw and sighed.

“You know what’s crazy?”

Smoke already hated where this was going.

“No.”

“You punched the wrong nigga.”

The cigarette paused halfway to Smoke’s mouth. He turned slowly toward his brother, prepared to tell him exactly where he could go with that opinion, but the words never came. Stack wasn’t smiling. There wasn’t even a hint of amusement on his face.

That was how Smoke knew he was serious.

“Isoo ain’t why you mad.”

Smoke looked away.

Unfortunately, that only proved the point.

Stack watched him before his attention drifted downward. The mixtape was still in Smoke’s hand.

That stopped him.

Because of what it represented. Because somehow, through the argument, the walk across the yard, and the fight, Smoke had never put the damn CD down.

“You still got it.”

Smoke frowned.

“What?”

Stack nodded toward the plastic case.

“You ain’t even notice, did you?”

For the first time Smoke followed his gaze. His eyes settled on the familiar handwriting stretched across the cover, and something tightened in his chest so suddenly it almost annoyed him.

Annie’s handwriting.

Uneven.

Familiar.

The same handwriting he’d spent years pretending didn’t matter anymore.

Two weeks.

She’d spent two weeks making it. Two weeks choosing songs and recording tracks and carrying around thoughts she apparently never intended to say out loud. Then she’d brought it all the way from North Carolina just to throw it at his head in the middle of a family cookout.

The memory should’ve irritated him. Instead, the corner of his mouth twitched.

Stack caught it immediately.

“There he is.”

Smoke rolled his eyes. “Shut up.”

“Nah.” A laugh escaped Stack before he could stop it. “That girl been stressin’ yo’ ass out since freshman year.”

The comment should’ve been easy to ignore. Instead it pulled a memory loose.

Not a fight or an argument.

Something worse.

A Saturday afternoon at Mary’s house nearly ten years ago.

The backyard had been packed with teenagers pretending they were older than they actually were. Music blasted from a speaker somebody’s cousin swore cost more than his first car. Folding chairs circled coolers full of drinks nobody was supposed to have. Half the boys spent the afternoon trying to look cool while half the girls pretended not to notice them trying.

Annie had been sitting on the hood of somebody’s car laughing so hard she nearly slid off the edge.

Stack remembered that part clearly.

The sunlight catching the gold in her earrings. Her hair pulled back. The way she laughed with her whole body when something genuinely caught her off guard.

Isoo stood nearby, running his mouth the way Isoo always did.

Talking.

Joking.

Trying to make everybody laugh.

For a while nobody paid much attention. Then Annie hopped down from the hood and wandered off toward the house with Pearline and a few other girls.

The conversation turned naturally after that.

At least until Isoo looked in the direction she’d disappeared and shook his head.

“Maaaannn, Annie get any thicker and somebody gon’ have to do somethin’ about it.”

A few of the boys laughed. Stack remembered laughing too.

At first.

Isoo grinned. “Y’all laughin’, but I’m serious.”

More laughter.

Mike threw a chip at him. “Shut yo’ dumb ass up.”

Isoo caught it and kept talking anyway. “Landry act all shy and innocent, bet it won’t take much to get in them pants.”

The laughter died just enough for the guys to start looking at each other. Enough for Mike to stop smiling and for Stack to notice Smoke. Because Smoke had gone completely still. Not the usual version everybody knew. 

This was different.

The kind of stillness that felt dangerous.

Isoo either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“What?” he laughed. “Y’all know I’m right.”

Nobody answered.

Stack remembered watching Smoke set his drink down.

Slowly. 

Carefully.

The way people did when they were trying very hard not to break something.

Or someone.

“Aight.”

The single word cut through the conversation.

Isoo looked over. “What?”

Smoke’s face gave away nothing. “Aight.”

The backyard had gone completely silent by then. Even the music seemed farther away.

Isoo laughed nervously. “What?”

Smoke took one step forward. “Don’t do that.”

The smile faded from Isoo’s face. “Do what?”

“Talk about Annie.”

The answer came calm. Too calm.

Stack remembered exchanging a look with Mike. Both of them already knew where this was headed.

Isoo tried to laugh again. It didn’t sound nearly as confident this time. “Man, I ain’t say nothin’.”

Smoke took another step. “Then keep it that way.”

Nobody spoke. The tension sat thick enough to touch. Then Mike stepped between them before either one of them could do something stupid.

“Everybody chill.”

Smoke didn’t take his eyes off Isoo. Isoo didn’t take his eyes off Smoke. Eventually somebody changed the subject. Somebody turned the music up. 

The moment passed.

At least on the surface.

Later that night Stack finally asked about it. “You really don’t like Isoo?”

Smoke hadn’t even looked up from whatever he was pretending to focus on. “I tolerate him.”

Stack remembered laughing. “What the hell that mean?”

“It mean I tolerate him.”

That had been the end of the conversation.

At least until now.

Standing beneath the pecan tree nearly ten years later, the memory came back so clearly Stack almost laughed.

Almost.

Because looking at Smoke now, looking at the bruised knuckles, the cigarette hanging from his mouth, and the mixtape still clutched in his hand, Stack finally understood something he probably should’ve understood a long time ago.

Smoke never got over anything when it came to Annie. Not the comments. Not the misunderstandings. Not the silence. And definitely not her.

The memory hit Stack hard enough that he started laughing all over again.

Smoke shot him a glare. “What?”

“You serious?”

“What the fuck so funny?”

Stack shook his head. “Man.”

“What?”

“Nigga, you almost fought Isoo over Annie before she was even yo’ girl.”

Smoke frowned. “That ain’t what happened.”

“That’s exactly what happened.”

“It ain’t.”

Stack laughed. “Nigga, you been holdin’ a grudge against that man for almost ten years.”

Smoke dragged on the cigarette and looked away.

Which was answer enough.

Stack laughed one final time before the amusement faded from his face. Something more serious settled into its place as his eyes looked back towards the house. Somewhere behind them Aunt Cheryl was probably still fussing. Pearline was probably trying to keep Annie from doing something she’d regret. Mary was probably regretting every decision that led her to this afternoon.

Eventually Stack sighed. “You know what really got you tho?”

Smoke didn’t answer.

Stack kept going anyway. “She was leavin’.”

The words hit home.

Smoke’s shoulders tightened.

Stack noticed.

“That’s what this really about.”

The cigarette burned quietly between Smoke’s fingers as he stared toward the trees.

“You thought she was stayin’.”

Silence.

“And then she grabbed that suitcase.”

The image came back instantly. Annie walking across the yard. Suitcase in one hand. Mixtape tucked beneath her arm.

Leaving.

Again.

The feeling that followed made Smoke’s stomach turn.

Stack saw the exact moment it happened. Saw the way his brother looked away. Saw the way his jaw tightened.

“You ain’t punch Isoo because Annie asked him to get her outta there.”

His voice came quieter now.

More careful.

“You punched him because she grabbed that suitcase again and the first person she reached for wasn’t you.”

The truth settled heavy between them.

Smoke stared out toward the trees and, for once, had absolutely nothing to say. Because his brother was right.

And they both knew it.

After a while Stack nodded toward the mixtape still resting in Smoke’s hand.

“You gon’ listen to it?”

Smoke looked down.

The handwriting seemed heavier now somehow. Not because it had changed, but because he finally understood what it cost her to make it. The physical proof that Annie had loved him enough to create something. Loved him enough to carry it across state lines. Loved him enough to spend eight years holding onto pieces of him she should’ve left behind a long time ago.

“I don’t know.”

Stack snorted. “That’s a lie.”

Smoke glanced up.

Stack shook his head. “You been listenin’ to Annie for damn near ten years.”

The words lingered beneath the pecan tree long after neither brother said anything else. Smoke looked down at the mixtape again and, for the first time all day, allowed himself to consider the possibility that everything he thought he knew about the last eight years might’ve been wrong.

The yard didn’t go quiet after Stack dragged Smoke away, but something in it changed. The music still played from the speakers near the patio, and the children eventually started running again once the adults stopped looking like somebody might get knocked into the grass next. A few people returned to their plates because food was food, even when the family business had just embarrassed everybody in a twenty-foot radius. 

But nobody really went back to normal. 

The dominoes table remained half-abandoned. Aunt Cheryl’s grill smoked unattended. Uncle Lewis stood near the center of the yard with his hands on his hips, looking at everybody like he was daring one more person to act a fool. The whole cookout felt bruised.

Annie stood in the middle of it with Pearline’s hand still wrapped around her arm and realized, slowly and then with a sickening drop in her stomach, that she had done exactly what she swore she hated. 

She had made everybody watch her hurt. 

She had dragged Pearline into it. Jada into it.

And now Isoo. 

Elijah was dragged into the worst, ugliest parts of herself and then stood there shocked when he bled too. 

The anger that had carried her across the yard and into the argument had started to burn out, leaving behind humiliation, tequila, and the awful clarity of consequences. Across from her, Isoo stood with Mike beside him, rubbing his jaw while pretending the punch had not landed as hard as everybody heard it land.

Annie swallowed around the knot in her throat and pulled herself out of Pearline’s hold. For a moment Pearline tightened her fingers like she thought Annie might do something else, but Annie only shook her head and stepped toward Isoo. The movement made several people pause, including Mike, who immediately stepped halfway in front of his cousin like he didn’t trust this day to stop being stupid on its own. Annie could not blame him. She barely trusted herself.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and the words felt too small for the amount of damage sitting around them.

Isoo blinked at her like he had not expected to be included in her regret. “For what?”

Annie almost laughed, but the sound would have come out wrong, so she looked down instead. “For pullin’ you into this. For askin’ you to take me away from here when I knew exactly what I was doin’.” Her voice thinned slightly on the last part because saying it out loud made it real in a way thinking it had not. “You ain’t deserve to get hit because I was tryin’ to make him mad.”

Mike made a sound under his breath that sounded suspiciously like agreement, but Isoo lifted a hand before he could start. There was still irritation in his face, and there should’ve been, but there was also enough understanding to make Annie feel worse. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, rubbing his jaw again. “You kinda did put me in the middle of the shit.”

“I know.” Annie nodded, blinking back tears she was tired of shedding in public. “And I’m sorry.”

Isoo looked past her toward the side of the house where Stack had taken Smoke, then back at her. “You good?”

That almost broke her. It wasn’t because she was good, it was because Isoo asking after taking a punch from the man she had actually been trying to hurt made her feel about two inches tall. “No,” she admitted, barely above a whisper. “But that still wasn’t fair to you.”

Behind her, Aunt Cheryl gave a low hum that said she approved of the apology but not nearly enough to be finished with Annie. 

That sound alone made Annie’s shoulders drop. She knew what was coming before she turned around. Aunt Cheryl had moved closer, Aunt Max and Geneva with her, and Pearline stood slightly behind them with her arms crossed tight against her chest and dried tears still on her face. The four of them together looked less like comfort and more like judgment with earrings on.

Before Aunt Cheryl could speak, movement near the driveway caught Annie’s attention. Jada was standing beside her car with her keys in one hand and her purse tucked beneath her arm. 

For a minute she simply stood there, looking towards Annie with an expression Annie couldn’t fully read. Not smug, angry or defeated exactly. Just tired in a way that made Annie’s own anger toward her feel suddenly old and useless. 

Their eyes met across the yard, and neither woman said anything. There was too much history and not enough relationship for words to do anything helpful. Jada gave the smallest nod, not a forgiveness or friendship nod, but a nod of acknowledgment. She then opened her car door and left without turning the moment into anything bigger than it needed to be.

Mary, unfortunately, was not nearly as graceful.

“I just wanna say—”

The collective groan that rose around the yard cut her off quickly.

Pearline laughed. The sound held no amusement whatsoever.

“No.”

Mary blinked. “No?”

“No.” The exhaustion in Pearline’s voice somehow made the word sharper.

For one stunned moment she simply stared at Mary. The woman had spent the entire afternoon looking uncomfortable, defensive, confused, and mildly offended depending on who happened to be talking to her. Right now she looked all four at once.

Mary folded her arms. “I was just tryna help.”

That made Pearline laugh again.

This time several people looked over.

“Help who?”

“Annie.”

“By doin’ what?” Pearline asked. “Having Jada show up so you could embarrass Annie?”

Mary opened her mouth. Closed it. Then shrugged. “How was I supposed to know she didn’t know about Jada?”

Pearline stared at her for a long moment. The anger she’d been carrying around shifted into something else. 

Disbelief maybe.

Because that answer would’ve meant a lot more if Mary hadn’t spent years inserting herself into situations that had absolutely nothing to do with her.

“Funny.”

Mary frowned. “What’s funny?”

“You suddenly worried about other people’s feelings besides your own.”

A few people nearby winced.

Mary’s expression hardened immediately. “Oh, here we go.”

“Yeah. Let’s go.” Pearline folded her arms across her chest. “You knew Stack and I was tryin’ to work on our shit.”

The tension in the yard changed, because now they weren’t talking about Annie and Smoke anymore. Now they were talking about something else.

Mary rolled her eyes. “Pearline—”

“No.”

The answer came quick.

Firm.

“You knew.”

Mary looked away briefly.

Pearline shook her head. “I knew Stack had a reputation. Shit, the whole county knew Stack had a reputation.”

That earned a snort from somewhere behind her.

Probably Cornbread.

She ignored it. “I knew what I was signin’ up for. I knew me and him wasn’t together.” Her eyes settled on Mary. “But you knew too.”

Mary’s jaw tightened.

The silence stretched just long enough for everybody to understand what Pearline was really saying. Mary didn’t owe her loyalty nor did she steal anything.

But Mary knew and still did it anyway.

Movement near the side of the house pulled several heads around.

Stack had reappeared.

He walked back into the yard from the direction he’d taken Smoke, hands shoved into his pockets and irritation written plainly across his face. One look at the group gathered around Mary and Pearline told him exactly where the conversation had gone while he was gone.

Unfortunately for him, when Pearline saw him, her eyes narrowed.

“Here come Satan himself.”

Stack sighed immediately. “Maaaannn.”

Mary looked relieved to see him. Pearline looked anything but. 

Stack stopped a few feet away. “What happened now?”

Pearline pointed at Mary. Then pointed at him. Then pointed back at Mary. The gesture somehow communicated an entire argument without requiring a single additional word.

Stack understood every bit of it.

Unfortunately.

Mary looked toward Stack as though he might somehow rescue her from the argument. “Tell her.”

The request earned a sharp laugh from Pearline. “Tell me what?”

Mary threw her hands into the air, visibly frustrated by the fact that nobody seemed interested in helping her case. “That y’all wasn’t even together when Stack and I hooked up.”

From where Annie stood, she watched something flicker across Pearline’s face. It didn’t look like anger. Not exactly. More like exhaustion. The kind that came from having the same conversation too many times with somebody determined not to understand it.

The problem had never been whether Mary and Stack were technically together. 

Everybody knew they weren’t.

That wasn’t the point.

Apparently Stack had finally reached the same conclusion.

“She know that.”

Mary frowned immediately. “Then why she actin’ like—”

“Because that ain’t what she mad about.”

The interruption landed hard enough to stop her.

Annie watched Mary blink. Then stare. Then look at Stack like he’d suddenly switched sides in the middle of the game.

Stack sighed and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. The gesture reminded Annie of Elijah. Not because they looked alike. It was the way both brothers seemed to reach for their necks whenever they were about to say something they didn’t particularly want to say.

“The point ain’t whether me and her was together.”

Mary folded her arms. “Then what is it?”

Stack looked directly at her. “The point is you knew me and Pearline was tryna figure somethin’ out.”

The yard seemed to settle around the statement. Enough for Annie to see Mary’s expression change, and to see Pearline stop looking angry and start looking hurt. Enough for everybody listening to understand exactly what Stack meant.

Mary opened her mouth as if she intended to argue. Nothing came out.

Stack nodded once. “And so did I,” he added quietly. “And I still did it anyway.”

That seemed to surprise everybody.

Including Pearline.

The admission lingered in the air longer than Annie expected. For most of the afternoon people had been defending themselves. Explaining themselves. Finding ways to make their mistakes belong to somebody else. Stack’s words carried none of that. No excuses or an attempt to soften the edges.

He owned it.

Annie watched Pearline look away first. Whatever answer she had been expecting from him clearly wasn’t that one.

Stack’s attention followed her immediately. “Pea.”

Pearline’s eyes found him almost against her will. “What?”

The answer came sharp enough to draw a few smiles from the people standing nearby.

Stack accepted it without complaint. “You right.” His jaw tightened briefly before he continued. “We wasn’t together.”

Pearline rolled her eyes so hard Annie almost laughed. “Stack.”

“Let me finish.”

Pearline crossed her arms. The look she gave him suggested she was considering several forms of violence.

Still, she stayed quiet.

Stack took a slow breath. “We wasn’t together,” he repeated. “But I knew how you felt.”

Something changed in Pearline’s face. Small. Quick. Easy to miss if Annie hadn’t been watching.

The crowd seemed to fade away. For one brief moment it looked like only the two of them existed.

“And if I’m bein’ honest,” Stack continued, “I knew how I felt too.”

The confession seemed to make him uncomfortable almost immediately.

Good. Annie thought he deserved it.

Stack shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced toward the ground before looking back at Pearline. “I should’ve never did it.”

The words came rougher now. 

Real.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

The entire yard seemed to pause, because Stack rarely apologized. Not without being forced.

Pearline stared at him for so long Annie started wondering if she intended to leave him hanging.

Then she shook her head. “You really practiced that and still sounded stupid.”

The laugh that escaped Aunt Max came out so suddenly she nearly choked on her drink.

A few other people joined in.

Even Stack smiled. 

Briefly.

“Probably.”

“Definitely.”

That earned another round of laughter. Some of the tension that had been suffocating the yard all afternoon finally loosened. Not completely. There were still too many wounds walking around for that. But enough for people to breathe again.

Annie smiled despite herself.

Pearline was making a joke out of it because that was easier than standing in the middle of a cookout and admitting she’d been waiting to hear those words for months.

But Annie knew what she was really saying.

I heard you.

I’m still mad.

But I heard you.

Aunt Max pointed immediately. “Good. We done here.”

Several heads turned toward her.

She pointed directly at Pearline next. “And stop cussin’.”

Pearline stared at her. “I only said one bad word.”

“That was enough.”

A few people laughed.

Including Pearline.

Finally.

Aunt Cheryl, who had spent most of the exchange watching everybody with the patience of a woman entirely too old for the foolishness surrounding her, pushed herself away from the grill and dusted her hands together.

“Alright.”

The single word cut through every conversation happening nearby.

People stopped talking.

Aunt Cheryl pointed directly at Mary. “Mary, go on home.”

Mary blinked and pointed at herself. “Me?”

“Yes, you.” Aunt Cheryl’s expression never changed. “Take your pale ass home before you “accidentally” ruin somebody else’s relationship.”

The yard erupted. Even Uncle Lewis laughed.

Mary looked genuinely offended. “Everybody actin’ like I’m the reason all this happened.”

The gasp that left Pearline’s mouth was so dramatic Annie actually turned toward her.

“Oh, this bitch—”

“PEA.”

“I know!”

Pearline threw her hands into the air.

“I know!”

Unfortunately, Mary kept talking. “Like I got magical powers or somethin’.”

Annie saw Pearline start forward before she fully committed to it. She also saw Stack recognize the danger immediately.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not.”

“Pearline.”

“I’m not!”

She absolutely was.

As soon as she took another step, Stack wrapped an arm around her waist and hauled her backward.

Pearline’s protest echoed across the yard. “LET ME GO.”

“No.”

“Just one.”

“No.”

“Stack.”

“No.”

The entire exchange happened so fast Annie barely had time to process it. Pearline twisted in his grip and pointed toward Mary, who had stopped beside her car to watch the chaos she’d created.

“PLEASE LET ME FIGHT HER.”

The request sent half the yard into laughter. Aunt Max bent over so suddenly Annie worried she might actually fall.

Mary looked offended. “Fight me for what?”

Pearline pointed harder. “THAT.”

Stack dropped his forehead against Pearline’s shoulder because he was laughing too hard to stay upright.

“Just one punch,” Pearline begged. “One slap. Somethin’.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Pea.”

She groaned loudly. “This is why women be choosin’ violence.”

Aunt Cheryl closed her eyes. “Lord.”

Before Pearline could argue again, Geneva spoke up from behind them.

“Go on.”

The yard went quiet.

Pearline blinked. “…What?”

Geneva pointed toward Mary’s car. “My auntie said go.”

Everyone watched Geneva, waiting to see what she would do next. Even Stack lifted his head.

Geneva folded her arms. “Everybody else wanna be mature about this shit, coddling this ho. But I’m ‘bout to slap this bitch if she don’t get the fuck on.”

The entire yard erupted.

Aunt Max nearly folded in half laughing.

Mary looked horrified and glanced around the yard as though searching for a single ally.

Nobody volunteered.

Not one person.

“Whatever, I’m outta here.” She exclaimed as she turned on her heels and left.

“Drive safe, ho,” Geneva called.

The laughter got louder.

Even Annie found herself smiling despite everything.

By the time Mary finally climbed into her car and drove away, the yard felt lighter than it had all afternoon. 

Aunt Cheryl stared off into the yard a little while longer before looking back at Annie. “Now you. Come inside.”

Annie wanted to argue. Wanted to say she was grown, that she didn’t need to be summoned like a child, that she had already been embarrassed enough for one afternoon. But Aunt Cheryl’s tone left no room for any of that. And more than anything, Annie was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of crying. Tired of standing in the yard while everybody looked at her like they had watched her come apart and were now trying to decide how much of her could be put back together before dinner.

The kitchen felt cooler than the yard, but not any easier to breathe in. Annie sat at Aunt Cheryl’s table with a glass of water she had not asked for and couldn’t make herself drink. Pearline sat across from her, still quiet in that dangerous way that meant the hurt hadn’t gone anywhere. Geneva leaned against the counter with her arms folded, soft-eyed but not soft enough to let Annie hide. Aunt Max stood near the stove, shaking her head every few seconds like she was replaying the whole scene and finding new foolishness each time. Aunt Cheryl remained standing at the head of the table, which somehow made Annie feel even more like she had been called into the principal’s office.

For a while nobody said anything. That was worse than yelling. Annie stared into the water and watched the surface tremble slightly every time her fingers brushed the glass. The tequila had left her with a warm, dull ache behind her eyes, but the buzz was fading fast enough to be cruel. Without it, every choice she had made in the last hour stood in front of her with perfect clarity.

Aunt Cheryl finally sighed. “Baby, I love you. I do. But you acted a damn fool out there.”

Annie closed her eyes.

“And before you start,” Aunt Max added, pointing at her, “yes, Smoke acted a fool too. We ain’t takin’ sides and he ain’t sittin’ at this table right now. You are.”

That made Geneva glance down, but she didn’t disagree.

Annie wiped at her cheek, even though there were no fresh tears there yet. “I know.”

“No,” Pearline said quietly. “I don’t think you do.”

Annie looked at her and the guilt from upstairs came back so quickly it nearly stole her breath. Pearline’s face was still tender from everything Annie had thrown at her. Not physically, but emotionally. The words had landed. Annie could see that now. She had wanted Pearline to hurt because she had been hurting, and that thought sat inside her like something rotten.

“I’m sorry,” Annie said.

Pearline looked away, pressing her lips together. “I know you are.”

“I shouldn’t have said all that to you.”

“Nah, you shouldn’t have.” Pearline’s voice remained even, which somehow made it worse. “And I shouldn’t have kept what I knew from you. Both can be true.”

Annie nodded, but Pearline was not finished.

“You hurt me, Annie. I get why you was mad. I do. But you looked at me like I brought you down here to humiliate you on purpose.” Pearline’s voice cracked slightly, and she swallowed before continuing. “I was wrong. I should’ve told you from the minute I saw him with Jada. But I wasn’t tryin’ to make you look stupid. I was tryin’ to protect some little piece of hope because I knew you still had it, and I knew he did too.”

The kitchen went quiet again.

Annie stared at her hands.

Geneva moved from the counter and sat beside her, close enough that her knee brushed Annie’s. “That’s the part you keep missin’. You keep talkin’ like you was the only one everybody could see hurtin’. But we saw him too.”

Annie’s throat tightened.

Geneva’s voice softened. “You really didn’t know, did you?”

Annie shook her head, and this time the tears came with no fight left behind them. “No.”

Aunt Max huffed, not unkindly. “Chile, that boy loved you so loud for somebody who barely opened his mouth.”

Despite herself, Pearline let out a broken little laugh. Geneva smiled sadly. 

Aunt Cheryl didn’t smile at all.

“He loved you,” Aunt Cheryl said. “And from what I just saw out there, he still do. But love ain’t worth much if all y’all do is use it to hurt each other.”

That one landed deep.

Annie covered her mouth with one hand, trying to hold something in that was already breaking loose. She had spent eight years telling herself Elijah hadn’t loved her enough to come after her, only to find out he had been reaching in every way he knew how. Letters. Calls. Cards. A mixtape. All these pieces she had not seen or had not understood, scattered behind them like evidence from a life neither of them had been able to explain. 

And even after learning all of that, even after hearing him say love in the present tense, she had still found a way to pick up the sharpest thing near her and swing.

Aunt Cheryl pulled out the chair across from Annie and sat down at last. That scared Annie more than when she had been standing. “You spent eight years waitin’ on that boy to come get you,” she said, her voice quieter now. “That’s what you told him out there. You waited for him to show up, say the right thing, fight for you the right way, know what you needed without you ever havin’ to say it plain.”

Annie could not look away from her.

“But what if it’s your turn now?” Aunt Cheryl asked. “What if the thing you been waitin’ on him to do is the thing you gotta do for him?”

The words moved through Annie slowly, then all at once.

Her chair scraped against the floor before she fully realized she had stood. Pearline looked up, and something like relief crossed her face. Geneva’s hand fell away from Annie’s arm as though she had known this was coming. Aunt Max stepped aside before Annie even reached the doorway.

“Go,” Pearline said.

Annie did.

She moved through the living room with her heart pounding so hard it made her chest hurt. The sounds of the cookout rushed back the moment she opened the front door, humid evening air wrapping around her as she stepped onto the porch. A few people looked over. Someone called her name. She didn’t stop. She took the steps too fast, nearly stumbled at the bottom, caught herself, and kept going across the yard, past the folding tables, past the abandoned plates, past Mike and Isoo sitting near the cooler.

She ran because walking felt impossible.

The driveway seemed longer than it had earlier. The road beyond it stretched under the fading Mississippi sun, quiet except for the distant hum of cicadas and the sound of her own breathing. Annie reached the edge of the gravel and looked both ways, searching for his truck, for taillights, for dust lifting off the road, for any sign that she had not waited too long this time.

There was nothing.

No truck.

No Elijah.

Only the empty road stretching ahead of her, wide and indifferent.

Annie stood there breathing hard, one hand pressed to her chest as the truth settled over her with a cruelty she had earned. 

For eight years she had waited for Elijah to come after her. For eight years she had told herself that if he loved her enough, he would find a way to show up.

Now she had finally gone after him.

And he was already gone.

End Note: I wanted to get this out to y'all as soon as possible, because the next chapter is going to take me some time. It will be HEAVY Smoke, possibly all Smoke. So I have to get my mind right to get into his mind as he listens to Annie's mixtape. 💿🥹 But let me know what you think about this chapter.

Tag List:

He didn’t need to know what was said.

Didn’t even need to know who said it.

Smoke drove with both hands on the wheel, grip steady on the leather. The door of the Colored schoolhouse swung open in its hinges before fitting into its frame, and he walked through the threshold with a quiet determination. He wasn’t there to argue. He was there to be clear; to shut an old door he never meant to leave cracked open in the first place.

The kids were long gone. All that remained was the ghost of their feet shuffling against the floorboards and the echo of high-pitched laughter. And her. She sat at the desk at the front of the classroom with a stack of papers and a thick red pencil, making straight lines across words with clean, even strokes, and just the right amount of pressure. 

Sunlight cut across the empty desks, catching the chalk dust that still hovered in the air. The classroom was quiet, but it wasn’t empty. History, resentment, and two different versions of the truth hung between the two of them like a physical weight that made the room feel smaller. It pressed against the walls and the lone window on the side of the building like it could feel the tension brewing and wanted out.

Smoke cleared his throat. 

She scoffed. A quiet, annoyed expulsion of breath. Then she looked up, and when her eyes met his they held his gaze, then went up and down his form slowly. Canvassing, maybe. Taking in the seriousness in his posture. Taking notice of the cold calm he carried.

“Demetria.” Smoke’s voice was cold too, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. It usually was. But this kind of cold was more resolve than anything. 

“Smoke,” she said back. 

“We need to talk.”

“Well, hello to you too,” she said sharply.

“Hey,” he said. “We need to talk,” he repeated, tone flat.

She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “About?” she asked with a challenge in her tone.

“Us.”

The word made her lean forward on her elbows. 

“I just came to say we’re done. For good this time,” he said firmly. He opened his mouth, then closed it, like he had something more to say but decided against it. 

“That’s it?” The look on her face went from amusement to surprise to something else in the span of a few seconds. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

“I’m sorry it took so long for me to say out loud. I should have said it sooner. That’s on me. But we been done a while. You know that.”

“You always did think silence was kinder than the truth,” she fired back. 

Smoke hung his head. Because she wasn’t wrong. Her anger, he could take on the chest. He at least owed her that. 

“Look, I don’t know what’s been said or who you been sayin’ it to,” he started. “But whatever’s been said, I’m here to put it to rest.” 

Something flashed across her face and left just as quickly. Recognition. And the sinking feeling of dread. “You must got somebody you care about a whole lot, to come all the way over here just so you could say it plain,” she said. “She know about me?” 

“I’m sayin’ it now,” he said, voice low. 

“Does she know about me?” She asked again. A little louder this time.

Smoke’s jaw ticked. 

“So there is somebody else,” she said carefully.

Smoke didn’t answer. 

She studied his face for anything— regret, sadness, anything. She closed her eyes to keep her composure and shook her head like it would somehow make the sting go away. It didn’t. But she put her dignity back on anyway.

“Well,” she said, almost breathless. “There it is.”

Smoke nodded once. Demetria looked at him like she couldn’t recognize the shape of the man standing in front of her anymore, then she went back to her papers with the same measured carefulness she always used. The force of her pen made the paper crackle on the desk. Her corrections felt more personal now. Like she was trying to cross him out of her life one red line at a time.

“You take care.”

“Or not,” she snapped.

Smoke nodded like he accepted the ire, then he turned towards the entrance. He walked into the cool Mississippi air outside and away from the tension that sat between them, ready to snap like a rubber band pulled taut. And when he closed the door to the schoolhouse behind him, he made sure it shut all the way.

“Mwen kontan.” 

She said it in such a sultry, whispery tone. Not on purpose, that’s just how Annie’s voice sounded to Smoke. Alluring and fragrant, like the scent of the magnolia blossoms scattered around them on the ground. 

It was an early Sunday evening in November. The magnolia tree that stood tall on the side of the boarding house was changing. Its delicate, white petals drifted loose from the branches overhead and fell soft into the yard like the last bit of summer was shedding itself, piece by piece.

They sat on her patchwork quilt under the remaining shade of the tree. Annie had her knees tucked beneath her, her new sketchbook open on her lap. Smoke was across from her, one knee up, forearm casually resting over it. His eyes were anything but casual, narrowed with a fierce concentration. A lantern sat close by the edge of the quilt. Its flame burned low and steady, painting gold shadows over the pages of Annie’s sketchbook and the tips of her fingers.

“Hold on,” Smoke fussed. “You gotta say it slower.” 

Annie chuckled. “Mweh con-tan,” she sounded out slowly.

Smoke was staring at her lips, trying to mimic the way she formed the words when she spoke. She was amused by his focus. Impressed. He had it in everything he did. That bitter resolve. 

“What that mean?” 

“It means I’m happy.”

“Mwen-kun-tin,” he tried.

Annie winced. “Close, but…just try it again,” she urged.

“No,” Smoke said flatly.

“Why not?”

“I said it just how you said it.”

“No,” Annie shook her head. “You didn’t.” 

Smoke’s mouth twitched. He looked away before it could fully turn into a smile. “Sounded close enough to me,” he grumbled. 

“Mweh con-tan,” she said slower.

“Mwen kun-tan,” he repeated.

Annie bit the inside of her cheek. He was doing it on purpose, with his stubborn self. 

“You laughin’ at me?” Smoke asked bitterly.

“No.”

“Yeah…you are.”

“Am not.”

A magnolia petal landed on the page. Smoke picked it up without thinking, turned it once in his hand, then placed it on the quilt like he was afraid to hold it too long for fear he’d crush it in his hands. 

“Say it again.”

“You’re enjoyin’ this too much,” he huffed.

“And you bein’ difficult on purpose.”

“Mm.”

“Mm,” she said louder. She laughed softly and shaded something with her pencil near the corner of the page. It was a sketch of the shape of his mouth. Just the corner and how it curved around the sound he kept getting wrong. How he’d pushed a nasal sound outward instead of dropping it down.

Smoke shifted closer by a fraction, looking down to the sketchbook curiously. “Can I see?”

Her fingers tightened around it out of instinct. 

“You ain’t got to.”

The gentleness in his words made her look up. Made her grip loosen. She turned the sketchbook towards him, setting it between them. On the page wasn’t just one drawing. There were several spread across the paper. The curve of a leaf. The twist of a root. The slope of a hand pouring tea. Felix curled up on the porch. Halfway tucked in the pages was a loose leaf drawing of the inside of a small house. Smoke stared at that one the longest. He knew instantly what it was. He’d seen her sketch of the outside of her shop before. But this one was different.  She pulled it out from where it was wedged and placed it in her lap. 

Bundles hanging from the ceiling on one side. 

A long counter in front. 

A curtain that led to other rooms. 

Small jars lined up neatly on shelves. 

He took in every section, every detail. 

“Your shop,” he said finally.

“One day,” Annie replied shyly. 

“One day, when?” 

Annie looked up. “When I got enough saved. When I know enough,” she listed off. “When Aunt Della thinks I’m ready. When…” she huffed out a breath softly. “When the world lets me, I guess.”

Smoke’s jaw worked. 

“It wouldn’t just be remedies,” she said, rushing to fill the quiet before it got too loud. “I’d sell teas, salves, tonics, food, too. It wouldn’t just be a shop,” she continued, searching for words that would land. “It’d be somewhere people can come when they got things they ain’t ready to say out loud, but they ready to stop lettin’ it hurt them.” 

Smoke kept quiet beside her. 

Annie took a deep breath. “My grandma had an apothecary. Nothin’ fancy,” she said softly. “Just a place where people came in whisperin’ and left breathin’ easier.”

Smoke watched her. Her eyes, the way they softened around certain words. Her hands, and how they fidgeted on the edge of the paper. He looked at the page again while she ran her finger lightly over the built-in shelves she drew. 

“I want that. Somethin’ with my name on it. Somethin’ I know how to keep.” 

He looked at her again. “You will,” he said firmly. 

The certainty in his voice made her go still. “You sound sure.”

“I am.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you.”

Annie tucked the drawing away and closed her sketchbook halfway, her hand smoothing over its cover. “You know some of me.”

Smoke nodded once. “I know enough.”

Silence settled between them again. Easy. Annie watched him for a moment, trying to read what had changed in his face. He looked the same mostly. Quiet. Steady. Shoulders still carrying that heaviness. But his eyes looked different.

He sat up straight and faced her. “Annie.” He said her name and she felt her heart thump hard in her chest. She couldn’t figure out why. He’d said her name a million times, but he’d never said it quite like this.

“Yes?” she replied. 

“I talked to your aunt.”

“About what?”

“You.”

The night moved around them. Crickets chirping in the trees, distant voices from a house down the street. Dogs barking, chickens roosting. It all seemed to quiet around this very moment.

“I told her I wanna court you. Proper.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

“And now?” she asked quietly.

“Now I’m comin’ to you.” 

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, eyes piercing. “I ain’t askin’ you for nothin’ you don’t wanna give,” he said. “And I ain’t askin’ you to stop what you been showin’ me.” 

Annie’s throat tightened. “That matter to you?”

Smoke’s eyes moved to the sketchbook, then back to her. “It matters to you,” he said plainly. “It matters to me.”

“I thought you ain’t believe in all that stuff,” she said. “Hoodoo.” 

“I don’t.” He shrugged. “I believe in you.” 

Annie drew in a small breath, tilting her chin up a little. “What does courtin’ mean to you?”

Smoke took his time to answer.  

“It means I come correct. I don’t sneak around corners with you. Don’t have folks guessin’ what you mean to me.  It means if I spend time with you, it’s cause I’m serious about you.” 

“You are?” 

“I am.”

She looked at him— a silent urge to keep talking, like he wasn’t already undoing her under this magnolia tree.

“I ain’t sayin’ I got everything figured out. I don’t. I got work that ain’t clean. I got Stack.” His mouth tightened faintly. “And I got things I still need to make right before I can ask for more than this.”

He sighed. “But I know what I mean,” he said. “And I don’t mean to waste your time.” 

Annie looked down at the sketchbook in her lap. This man, whose words always held weight, had looked closely at her dreams sketched in graphite and smudged lines and simply said —he wanted to be part of them. 

She looked back at him. “If I say yes,” she said slowly. “I want my shop. I want my work. I want…I wanna be somebody outside of who I’m with.” 

“You already are,” he said, voice low.

Annie blinked.

His voice stayed low. “I ain’t askin’ to make you smaller.”

Annie’s breath caught. “Then what you askin’?”

He paused for a moment, then— “To walk beside you while you grow.” 

The silence that sat between them wasn’t empty. It was so full that Annie had to look away just so she could breathe. 

That’s when she felt it.

A nervous laugh.

It rose up in her throat— not because anything was funny, but because the weight of this moment was so heavy, she had to lighten it somehow before it swallowed her whole. She tried to suppress it, but the corners of her mouth had already turned up.

“You laughin’ at me?”

He noticed. Of course he did.

“No!”

Smoke’s mouth twitched. “Yes you are.”

“No I’m not!”

“You a bad liar.”

“I'm not lyin'...you just...makin’ me nervous right now,” she admitted softly.

His eyes softened. “You can take your time to think about it.”

Annie shook her head immediately. “No,” she said. “I don’t need time,” she assured him. 

His eyes got serious again.

“I’ll let you court me.”

Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. Something much more dangerous to her composure. “Yeah?”

Annie’s lips curved into a fully encompassing smile that spread gently across her face. “Yeah.” 

He held out his hand for her. A question. She put her hand in his and they laced their fingers together carefully, palms warm and steady against each other. The answer.

The tree shed another petal. It drifted down between them and landed on their intertwined hands. They didn’t move it. The lantern burned low. They sat like that beneath the magnolia tree as the last of summer continued to fall around them.

The next morning was a blur. Between the demands of empty stomachs and the nervous tremor of her own hands, a nagging anxiety sat on her shoulders and butterflies fluttered violently in the pit of her belly. A sigh of relief left her lips as the last lodger headed out the door, leaving her and Aunt Della to at least be able to clean up the kitchen and dining room in a tempered silence. 

The wind chimes on the porch fluttered in the breeze, whistling a throaty, breathless jingle that did nothing to calm her nerves. Aunt Della glanced her way a few times, but said nothing. Even Felix tried to soothe her, his purrs doing little to bring her any real solace. 

Annie shoved a biscuit in her mouth to give herself something to do. The warm fluffiness filled her mouth and the butter satisfied her tastebuds with its rich, melty goodness. She sighed then took another bite, closing her eyes as the sustenance moved through her body.

Maybe she was just hungry. And maybe her anxiousness had nothing to do with him.

She moved quicker, stacking, sweeping, wiping, scraping until the house smelled like eucalyptus, lavender, and bleach.

Annie collapsed on the couch in the front room, but not from exhaustion. From adrenaline that had nowhere else to go. Her heart beat rapidly and she fingered her ileke beads like that could somehow calm it. Morning light cut warm and light through the front windows like a balm on her skin. She tilted her head back and let her eyes close, basking in the quiet after the chaos of breakfast. 

The scent of tobacco, peppermint, and bay rum floated through the screen door. Slowly—like the rich, layered smells that arrive in a kitchen when meat, butter and herbs fold into each other on the stove.

Then the screen door cracked open and Smoke stepped through. 

Annie’s mouth went dry.

The first thing she noticed was the way he darkened the doorway once he stepped past the threshold. He was tall, well over six feet. Large and imposing frame, and even though she was a tall woman herself, it felt like he towered over her. The muscles on his arms and shoulders filled out every inch of his white collared shirt, pressing against the starched fabric with a powerful, restrained strength. His suspenders held up trousers that sat comfortably around his hips. His boots were heavy on his feet even though his steps were light. It was a subtle contradiction that made her tongue feel like cotton in her mouth. 

The second thing she noticed were the flowers in his hand. Two separate arrangements— one a mixture of white, cream, and greenery. The other was a mixture of vivid colors that looked like a rainbow painted the petals. Each was wrapped in brown paper and tied gently with twine.

Smoke removed his hat and turned to see Annie spread lazily across the couch. Apron halfway untied, scarf to the side, legs hanging off the edge, dress tracing the curve of her hips. She looked beautiful with her feet dangling in the air, bent nickel hanging loosely off a string around her left ankle, shoulders relaxed like she didn’t have a care in the world. He liked that look. Wanted to see more of it.

He was doing that staring thing again, Annie thought to herself. The way his eyes slowly swept up and down her body gave her goosebumps, and she suddenly became very aware of how she was presenting. Worn dress, apron smudged with stains, hair fuzzy in her cornrows, barefoot and lounging on the couch. But the heat in his eyes turned a casual glance-over into a smoldering glare that pinned her in place. The paper around the bouquets crinkled under his grasp as he adjusted them in his hand. When his voice finally broke the loaded silence that had overtaken the front room of the boarding house, it was rough with something that made her spine snap straight. Her legs followed, then her hands, dragging her upwards until she was sitting up completely.

“Good mornin’.” 

Annie smiled up at him, a sight that beamed brighter than the morning sun. “Good mornin’.”

Smoke took a step closer, then two, and with one hand grabbed the white bouquet out of his other and extended them towards Annie. “For you.”

“Thank you,” she said, inhaling their scent. 

Smoke nodded once, then looked around the room. “Where’s your aunt?”

“Somewhere out back,” she said breathily, taking another sniff of the flowers. 

“These for her.”

“Awww, ain’t you sweet?”

“Don’t tell nobody,” he said in that low register that made her skin tingle, with a timbre that told her he wasn’t joking even though the corner of his mouth lifted when he said it. 

He proceeded into the kitchen then out the back door, leaving Annie with her own thoughts and the absence of…him. His presence stayed in the room even though he was gone, and it wasn’t just because the smell of his cologne lingered behind. Her head tilted when she realized what day it was. Monday. What was he doing here?

“What we doin’ today?” He asked as he stepped back into her space.

Annie’s breath stuttered.

Aunt Della listened in from the kitchen, looking entirely pleased with herself. 

Annie cleared her throat and shut her mouth that had opened at Smoke’s words. Not because she wasn’t used to him being forward. But because the look in his eye told her he was dead serious when he asked her that question.

“I gotta stop by Chow’s,” she started, to which he acknowledged with a nod. “Then the drugstore,” she continued. She listed things off until she stopped to look down at what she needed to do before anything else. “I gotta wash up first. Change.” 

“I’ma be right here,” he assured her, sinking deep into the couch, putting his head back, and spreading his legs. 

Annie took one more look at him and darted up the stairs.

Thirty minutes later she was in front of the mirror, blouse tucked into a halfway-fastened skirt. Her hair was taken down from her cornrows, oiled, greased, parted down the middle, and pulled back. 

Except one piece that just wouldn’t lay flat. 

She brushed it once, then brushed it again. It refused to lay right, refused to stay right. Her hairbrush clattered on the dresser where she dropped it. 

“What am I doing?” she asked like the walls could talk back. 

She gripped the edge of the dresser, then touched the open edge of her blouse still unbuttoned at the throat. Her fingers rested there a moment before she remembered to button it. 

Her fingers weren’t steady. She cursed under her breath, buttoning it with trembling hands. She smoothed the front down, turning to the side to make sure it was tucked all the way in. 

Then she picked up her hairbrush again. Went over the same spot. Got the same result. 

She threw her hairbrush down with frustration, flustered. 

All of a sudden she felt very alone. More alone than she’d felt since she got to Clarksdale. She tried to blink away the tears but one escaped her eye. It rolled down her cheek, dropping onto her dresser. 

She missed her friends from home. 

She missed her family.  

She didn't expect this. Didn’t expect him. 

And now she was standing in the middle of something new surrounded by people who barely knew her. No mama who always knew what to say. No brothers teasing. No daddy who would pretend it wasn’t making him emotional seeing his little girl stepping into her role as a woman.

Maybe it was a sign. 

She didn’t know what she was doing. She couldn’t even get her hair right without falling apart.

What did she know about being courted?

The word felt strange in her throat. New. Like a dress made out of fine fabric that she hadn’t yet learned how to move in. Like something she wanted to be careful with, to not wrinkle. Something she wanted to spin in front of the mirror just to see how it caught the light. 

And maybe, just maybe….if it fit just right, she could keep it.

Her stomach fluttered. 

She didn’t know what came after she said yes.

She’d heard stories from her friends back home, but she was never in the thick of it to look around and see how it felt. 

She didn’t know how close she was supposed to stand beside him, what folks would hear if he said her name too soft. Didn’t know if holding his hand would feel natural or if she’d overthink every step. She didn’t know what part of herself was meant to stay guarded and what part was allowed to lean.

But between the frustration, and the fear, and the homesickness that had a vice grip on her nerves…she still wanted to try.

That was the part that kept resurfacing.

She wanted it. Wanted him beside her. Wanted to be beside him. And she wanted folks to see.

The truth of it rose up so plainly, it didn’t leave room for her to argue with herself about it.

She wanted to know what Smoke looked like when he didn’t hold himself back so much. Wanted to learn what his quiet felt like when it belonged to her. Wanted to see if walking beside him in the daylight felt like sitting beside him under the magnolia tree in the backyard.

She rubbed her ileke beads and let the touch ground her. Then she put some oil on her fingers, the special blend her mama made that halfway leaked out in her trunk, and brushed the worrisome part of her hair the way her mama always did when she got too frustrated to do it herself. Rub, smooth, brush, set. 

She looked in the small, age-spotted mirror again, and her mouth curved up into a small, winsome smile.

Maybe she didn't know what she was doing.

But maybe the only thing she needed to do today was walk downstairs, meet his eyes, and take it one step at a time.

The floorboards upstairs groaned and Smoke’s head snapped towards the sound. He rose slowly from his spot on the couch, keeping his eyes trained on Annie as she walked down the stairs with a hand on the banister. 

His gaze moved over her. 

She wore a deep mustard-colored blouse tucked into a navy blue ankle-length skirt and high button leather boots. Her purse was slung over her shoulder and her skin still looked warm from her bath.

“You look nice.” 

“Thank you.”

“Real nice.”

Annie’s cheeks warmed. 

“Ready?” he asked.

Annie smiled once she got to the bottom of the staircase. “I’m ready.” 

Aunt Della stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the front room, arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes went from Smoke to Annie and back. “Y’all don’t have too much fun out there,” she smirked. “And watch my baby,” she said to Smoke.

“I will,” Smoke said as he put his hat back. He opened the door for Annie and stepped back to turn to Aunt Della. “Always.” 

Aunt Della shook her head playfully and turned back to the kitchen, arms still folded but a grin on her lips. 

The ride over to Fourth Street was quick—just two short blocks. People in front of Chow’s Grocery were few and far between, but the sidewalk was far from empty. Outside, business moved as usual. A vendor restocked produce while a worker inspected their freshness. A few customers left the store with items wrapped tightly in brown paper while their children skipped alongside them with peppermint sticks and molasses chews in hand. Wagons trekked by slowly with mounds of cotton in the back, and the constant hammering of picks chipping ice blocks apart echoed in the street.

Smoke rounded the front of his truck to open the door for Annie. He held up a hand for her to balance herself on and took care to make sure she was steady once she stepped out. He followed behind her as they walked to the entrance, his hand on the small of her back as he held the door for her.

The inside held the sweet pungency of chicory in burlap sacks being hauled from the back and piled high by the windows. Charles and Bo Chow stood behind the front counter, Charles weighing something on the scale while Bo wrote an entry in the ledger. A smirk spread across Bo’s face when he saw Smoke and Annie at the door and clocked their closeness. He nodded at Smoke, then slid his eyes over to Annie and waved at her, drawn by the warmth that always seemed to radiate off her. 

“Baby,” Smoke started, exchanging a look with Bo. “I need to go holler at Bo real quick.”

“Okay,” Annie responded in that sweet, syrupy Louisiana drawl of hers.

She drifted across the store looking at her list, then made her way down one of the aisles in search of something else entirely. Smoke watched her go, watched her disappear, replayed it in his head. Then he turned to Bo. He was wiping down a display as Charles rang up a customer at the till.

“How you been, man?” Bo asked.

“Good, good,” Smoke said. He greeted him with a firm handshake, then pulled back to get a good look at him. “Damn, fatherhood huh?”

“I look that bad?”

“You look like shit.”

Bo laughed, the corner of his eyes crinkling with it. He looked tired, but content in a way that made his eyes twinkle. Like he was at peace despite it all. “Tired as hell. But I’m happy,” he nodded. “We happy.” 

“I’m happy for you, Bo.”

“Thanks man,” Bo replied, shaking Smoke’s shoulder. His eyes flicked over the store. “Della’s girl…that’s you?”

“You mean Annie,” Smoke corrected. 

Surprise overtook Bo’s face and he raised an eyebrow. A question. “Yeah, I mean Annie.”

“Yeah,” he answered. Firm. “She mine.”

Bo clapped Smoke on the shoulder, looking at him with a sense of shock and awe. “Oh shit,” he exclaimed, putting a fist in front of his mouth. “Look at you, fixin’ to be in my shoes soon, Smoke.”

Smoke shot him a look as he walked away, but something in him got quiet when the thought crossed his mind. Then it got warm.

Annie, a mother.

Him. 

A father.

He shook the thought away just as quickly when they became poisoned by thoughts of his own father. 

That felt like a metaphor for his own life— innocence being corrupted by its own blood.

The thought of being a father after putting his own in the ground felt devastatingly ironic, but hope flickered somewhere that maybe it could rewrite whatever went wrong with his own.

He shook his head and kept walking through the store, his legs carrying him past the aisles in slow, measured steps. He didn’t rush. He knew exactly where Annie was. 

Annie was still reeling. 

From him calling her baby. From the way he said it with that deep Mississippi drawl. Her cheeks were warm, skin flushed, and all of a sudden, everything felt hot despite the store being cool.

She stood in the aisle, humming under her breath, half bent over as she flipped through a wire basket on a shelf filled with seed packets. 

“Why she want this when we got it in the backyard?” She fussed. 

She shook her head, plucked the seed packet from the stack, and stood up. They dropped into her shopping basket as she walked further down the aisle. She picked up the small bag of feed and saw a shadow out of the corner of her eye. She ignored it and went about her business crossing items off her list when she heard it.

“Hey stranger.”

She turned around.

Reverend Carter stepped around the corner.

Red button up, brown tweed waistcoat, gold pocket watch hanging. And that silver signet ring that he rubbed with the pad of his thumb. She looked down in his shopping basket and her brows knit at the contents inside. 

Her lips tightened into a line, that same odd sense of familiarity crept up on her again and made her insides tumble with unease. 

“Hey.” She adjusted the strap of her purse around her shoulder.

A grin spread across his face. “How you been?”

“Good,” she nodded. “You?”

Carter nodded like he was choosing his words carefully. “I’ve been doin’ just fine,” he said slowly.

Annie shifted her weight. “So you’re back?”

“For a little.” 

She blinked. “Where you speakin’ at this time?”

“Church off Yazoo,” he said quickly.

She frowned for a second, then relaxed her face. 

Carter chuckled under his breath. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You stayin’ at the house?”

He smirked to the side then looked back. “I’m stayin’ with the pastor.”

“Makes sense.” 

“Yeah…makes perfect sense.”

His eyes dropped to her ileke beads, then back up. The glance was quick, barely even noticeable. But she did. The hand that wasn’t holding her basket rose to touch her beads protectively. 

Smoke noticed it too. 

He was at the top of the aisle, watching.

He saw Carter’s eyes dip to her chest. It was just a brief second, but the flicker made his chest tighten. 

He crossed the aisle in three long strides. He kept his eyes forward, locked on Carter who had sensed him looming and had since looked up from Annie. 

Smoke stepped behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist, the motion tucking her into his side. The gesture was smooth, natural, like her body had no business not being there all along.

Annie let out a quiet exhale. It was a short, controlled breath that made her shoulders relax.

Then she moved—but she didn’t move so much as melt. She relaxed back into Smoke’s touch, folding easily into him. His fingers curled around her hip, but his eyes didn’t leave Carter’s.

“Afternoon,” Carter said politely to Smoke.

Smoke just stared at him, his dark hooded eyes like black orbs piercing into the depths of whatever lay behind Carter’s. No nod. No acknowledgement. Just a cold, tactical assessment.

Carter blinked. “Y’all goin’ to the Harvest Party next month?”

“Yeah,” Annie replied quickly. She felt Smoke’s grip tighten on her hip.“We—”

“What business a preacher got at a juke joint?” Smoke asked, voice flat.

“I ain’t goin’,” Carter said, rubbing his signet ring. He looked down at it, then looked back up at them. “Just tryna make conversation.”

Smoke and Annie glanced at each other out of the corner of their eyes. 

“Well,” he said, tipping his hat. “Y’all have a good rest of your day.” 

Then he walked away.

The bustle of Chow’s went on around them but they didn’t hear it— like they only existed now in their own little bubble. Then Smoke dipped his head to her ear and pressed his lips there.

Three short kisses. Soft despite the intensity of the feeling behind them. Warm, from the closeness and something else entirely. They felt less like a kiss and more like a claim.

One right behind the ear, one lower on the skin right above the neck, and one right on the shell. His nose nuzzled there for a second before he opened his mouth and hummed right into her ear. Low, deep, right into the part of her ear that made his voice vibrate right down her spine. 

“You good?” 

“Mhmm,” she hummed.

She looked over her shoulder at him and his eyes were closed at the sound of her voice. She stroked his beard and his eyes opened to find hers darker. Her fingers grazed the shell of his ear. A gentle touch that made him fight off a shiver. 

“Behave,” he said, squeezing her hip gently.

Annie grinned. She turned away from his grasp and slinked out of the aisle like nothing happened. Then she glanced over her shoulder at him once more to bat her eyes at him before slipping completely out of his sight. Smoke stood there watching her walk away, his body still warm from where she rested against it. He flexed his hands at his sides to subdue the fire she stoked in him, then followed behind her.

Outside, the air smelled like spice and the bite of the chilly November air. Annie adjusted the paper-wrapped bundle from Chow’s against her hip and slipped it into her purse. Smoke stepped out behind her with the chicken feed sack tucked under his arm and the rest of Aunt Della’s order in his other hand like it weighed nothing. He watched a shiver run down Annie’s spine that she tried to hide.

“Cold?”

“A little.”

“Here.”

Smoke shrugged off his jacket and laid it over Annie’s shoulders as they walked towards his truck. The smell wafting from King’s Tamales Stand next door stopped Annie in her tracks as a man working the booth shouted his prices to folks passing by and wrapped hot tamales in paper. Warm masa, spice, meat steamed softly inside of corn husks. Steam curled up from a heavy pot blackened by use and hit the inside of the tin roof of the stand that had a crooked hand-painted sign attached to the front.

Smoke glanced at Annie. “Hungry?” 

Annie looked at him with those wide brown eyes of hers. Then her stomach answered before she got the chance. She scoffed, looking down at it like it betrayed her thoughts, then back up at Smoke. 

Smoke’s mouth twitched. “Come on.” He shifted the sack higher beneath his arm and stepped towards the stand. “How many you want?” 

“One.”

“Just one?”

Smoke looked towards the tamale man. “We’ll take four.”

Annie blinked. “Four?”

Smoke looked back at Annie. “I’m hungry, too.” 

The man behind the stand grinned like he’d seen this before. “Two for the gentleman, one for the lady now, and one for when she gets hungry later.”

“Exactly,” Smoke agreed.

Annie scoffed, looking away before a smile broke out on her face.

“Hot?” the man asked.

Smoke looked back at Annie again. She lifted her chin, offended despite herself. “Hot.”

Smoke looked back to the grinning man and nodded once. “Hot.”

“You think I wouldn’t like hot?”

“I didn’t know that’s why I asked.”

“You forget where I’m from?”

“I remember.”

The tamales came wrapped in paper, steam rising as the man passed them over to Smoke. He paid, coins dropping clean in the man’s palm. “Enjoy,” he said as they turned down the sidewalk. 

They walked a little ways down the side of the building, stopping by a patch of shade where the street noise softened around them. Smoke set Aunt Della’s things carefully by his feet, then handed Annie her tamales. He unwrapped his own with easy hands. Annie watched him without meaning to. The way he carefully peeled back the husk. The way the steam curled around his fingers. The way he took the first bite and let it sit in his mouth before he started chewing. He chewed once, twice, then nodded faintly to himself. 

“That good?”

“Mhmm.” He took another bite. 

Annie unwrapped hers, holding it carefully between her fingers as the heat bled through the paper. The first bite was soft and smoky. The cornmeal was tender, but not enough to fall through her fingers. The meat was rich with salt, pepper, and something earthy underneath. She chewed thoughtfully, her mouth analyzing every flavor. Smoke was already on his second tamale, but was chewing slower now, watching her. 

“What?” she asked.

“You makin’ a face.”

“I’m thinkin’.”

Smoke’s brows knit together. “About a tamale?”

“Mhmm.”

His mouth curved. “That so?”

“Absolutely.”

She took another bite, slower this time. “It’s good.”

Smoke nodded but kept his eyes trained on her for the—

“But.”

“I knew it.”

Annie smiled faintly. “It could use a lil’ more depth.”

“Depth?”

She nodded. “Depth.”

Smoke looked down at his half-eaten tamale then back up at Annie. “It’s a tamale.”

“And?”

Smoke looked amused now. He tilted his head. “What would you do to it?”

Annie shifted her weight. “I’d give it somethin’ to round out the pepper,” she said. “So it don’t just sit on top.”

Smoke just looked at her. “You always this particular?”

“With food? Yes.”

“And everything else?”

Annie opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked down at her tamale, then back at him. And when she spoke, her words came out softer than she expected them. “I know what I like.”

Smoke’s gaze hadn’t left her. “Good.” He took another bite, slowly. The cornmeal broke apart clean between his teeth. A long chunk of saucy meat landed on his tongue and he slurped it down his mouth without breaking eye contact.

“You starin’.”

Annie blinked. “Am not.”

“What you lookin’ at then?”

“You got somethin’ on your face.”

He ran a hand through his beard. “For real?” 

“It’s gone now.”

He couldn’t ignore the mirth in her eyes. She looked away, unwrapping the last tamale with more attention than it needed. The corner of Smoke’s mouth lifted. 

“Where I’m from, folks put more life into they food,” she said, turning back to him.

“More life?”

“Yep.”

“What that mean?”

“It means…” she said, looking towards the street like she could find the words there. “Food should taste like somebody remembered where they came from when they made it.”

“You sayin’ the people who made this…forgot where they came from?”

“No.” She smiled into her food. “They just knew wherever they was goin’ didn’t like it hot!”

Smoke huffed a laugh. Fourth Street moved around them, unconcerned. And the tension from inside of Chow’s softened into something easier. Something with steam, spice, and a little more kick. 

“I’ll make sure to let King know.”

Annie swatted his chest. “Smoke, don’t you dare!” 

When they were done eating, Smoke gathered Aunt Della’s order again and Annie threw the empty wrappers into a nearby waste barrel. She wiped her fingers against her handkerchief, the taste of pepper and cornmeal still heavy on her tongue. 

They left their items from Chow’s locked in Smoke’s truck, which he left in front of the grocery store at Annie’s insistence. Annie enjoyed the scenery as they walked leisurely towards the next stop on her list of errands. Smoke enjoyed the scenery too— her. Her hair, tucked into a thick bun, had tendrils hanging down the sides of her face that blew with the wind. One kept sticking to the shell of her ear, tickling her when it hit just right. The beads tucked under the neckline of her dress rattled if she moved a certain way. And she still had his jacket on to shield her from the wind. The sight of her walking around with his suit jacket draped over her shoulders did something to him that he couldn’t explain and didn’t want to. 

They neared the crossroad where Fourth Street met Issaquena, the street lined with shops for personal and grooming services. Luella’s Dressing Room & Alterations, Ritzy’s Beauty Salon, Brown’s Barbershop, and others sat along a row of close-knit brick and wooden storefronts with mended awnings and handmade signs.

The noise of the street got louder as they approached the block where Luella’s and Ritzy’s stood across from the barbershop. Or maybe it was just the noise in Annie’s head. She walked closest to the sidewalk with Smoke right beside her, watching her closely. His hand would find her lower back if he saw her steps falter or slow. They dodged some kids roughhousing, a stand or a low hanging sign, a crack in the sidewalk.

The area in front of the barbershop was full of men standing on lampposts smoking cigarettes, people watching, and chatting each other up. Suspenders loose or off, hats sitting low, legs bent, feet on the brick barbershop building while they waited their turn. The striped pole outside spun slowly with the wind. The smell of shaving soap, pomade, and hot comb smoke drifted upwards from the barbershop and the beauty salon across the street. The men outside let their eyes wander when Annie approached them on the sidewalk— and froze when they saw Smoke right next to her. Conversations paused, necks craned slowly. Smoke guided her through the crowd that parted for them with his hand at her back. The men acknowledged him, some giving him daps, others giving a firm nod. Some said a few polite words, tipping their hats and greeting them both as they walked by. But Smoke kept his hands on Annie. Always on her. 

Sunflower Music was painted in gold lettering on a black wooden sign that hung perpendicular to the sidewalk. The awning was a muted red, the color faded by the sun and wear, and stuck out of a narrow brick storefront with tall display windows in the front. Folks walking by would just stop and stare at what was inside— sheet music, instruments, phonographs, a lone Columbia Graphophone. Stacks of records displayed like treasure. Once the shop bell guided them through the door, the smell of paper, varnished wood, and cigars turned the crisp winter air to something with more bite. The space was long and spread out. Wooden floors. Pressed-tin ceiling. Ceiling fans turning slowly overhead. Most of the displays were spread out across the walls except a few items that were secured behind glass cases and oak cabinets shined to a mirror finish. 

A musician tested out strings by the wall where the instruments were displayed. A few church mothers Annie recognized from First Baptist Missionary were flipping carefully through church hymn sheet music displayed in stands on the other side of the shop. 

The owner stood by one of many phonographs with a record in his hands. He placed it in one, cranked the machine, and dropped the needle, all in one smooth, practiced motion. The customer standing next to him waited for the beat to drop. The record spun, the sound cracked slightly, then the smooth sound of a brass band spread throughout the room. Annie paused. The customer bopped his head to the fast-paced, soulful music coming from the phonograph speakers. 

Then the cornet solo hit.

Annie stilled entirely. 

The sound of conversation faded away, even the pointed looks of the church mothers who recognized her walking hand-in-hand with Smoke, she paid no mind. The familiarity of the music made her chest twist painfully. It sounded like home. Felt like it too. Like street musicians, second line parades, and rain hitting tin roofs during summer storms. 

“Annie?” he asked, voice low. He touched the small of her back.

Once she caught her breath, she whispered, “Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she replied, blinking back the tear that threatened to drop from her left eye. “Just reminds me of home.” She blinked and she could see it clearly. A rickety old shack. The fierce, stubborn, woman who lived inside who felt more like a spirit than a memory. “My great-grandmama,” she said a little softer. “Before she passed…she loved listening to the cornet. I don’t know why but that was the only instrument that made her face light up no matter how out of it she was.”

Smoke rubbed her lower back and they moved deeper in the store but Annie felt like she was walking through water. They ended up by the stack of records which stood close to the instruments along the wall. 

“That’s the thing about music,” he said. “It has a way of bringin’ you back to somebody, even after they long gone.”

Annie exhaled sharply. She went through the Vaudeville records but she wasn’t really looking. Smoke stood by her side, facing her, waiting. 

“We lost her to the hurricane. Back in ‘15.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“She wouldn’t leave.” Her voice cracked. 

“What you mean?”

Annie took a deep breath.

“She lived deep in the bayou. Water filled with gators,” she chuckled, shaking her head. “She knew the storm was comin’ before it did. Said if the water’s fixin’ to take her she ain’t gon’ run.” 

Annie looked towards the window like the memory called her there for some reason. “She said she had somebody on the other side waitin’ on her.” 

Smoke nodded once, eyes patient. “You know who?”

“No,” she said. “She was sold downriver ‘fo she could remember anyone.”

“Damn,” Smoke whispered. 

She smiled. It was faint, like it was pushing through the grief. “She was alone her whole life…’til she started having babies.”

“How many?”

“Fourteen.”

Smoke whistled low.

Annie hummed. “She was somethin’ else.”

The memory of her great-grandmother flashed quickly through her mind like a blur. Eyes that looked different…older than her age, and much younger at the same time. Her frail hands dragging a stick through swamp mud, leaving marks that looked less drawn than remembered.

“What was her name?”

Annie blinked and it was gone. Her hand rose to her ileke beads again, then she looked up at Smoke with the softest, widest, brown eyes, and the tenderness in them made him sigh. 

“Antoinette,” she said finally. Like the name pulled something out of her that made her hesitate to say it out loud.

Smoke rubbed her shoulder, pulled her close and kissed the top of her head. 

Annie put a hand on his chest, leaning into his touch. 

They let the silence sit between them for a few moments. Let the quiet ache until it dulled into something easier to move on from.

“Anyway,” she said finally, pulling herself together. “Let’s get what I came here for.” Her fingers walked the records in search of the ragtime one Aunt Della wanted.

“What kinda music they listen to, over there in France?”

“They liked a lot of the stuff we brought over.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Our regiment had a band and everything.” 

“Were you in it?” She teased.

His mouth twitched. “Nah.” 

The musician testing out guitars hit a chord with a slider that made Smoke’s hand tap once against the record box before he caught himself. He looked at Annie and she was already looking at him. 

“What?” he asked.

Annie arched her brow. “You like that?”

“It’s nice.”

“Why?”

Smoke exhaled. “It’s slow. Got a little ache to it.”

Annie chuckled low.

The guitar player took his slider off and played something a little louder, a little faster, a deep Blues riff.

“You like this one, too?” 

“This more Stack’s style.”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“What?”

“It’s more Stack’s style but your hand been tappin’ away since he started playin’.” 

Smoke looked down at his hand then back to Annie. “Don’t mean I can’t enjoy it.”

“You right,” she smirked. “But you tappin’ along like you know this song by heart.”

“I do.” 

Annie frowned. “From where?”

“My daddy.” He paused. Looked down. Sighed. “He played the guitar.”

“Oh,” she mouthed. She heard something in his words even though his voice was steady. Pain. Shame. Guilt. Loss. Whatever it was, it weighed heavy.

His jaw tightened. “Back then…” he drifted off. “The music felt kinder than the man.” His eyes found her again.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

Annie rubbed his arm, then pulled it around her. The gesture made his shoulders relax, and she wrapped her arms around his chest. “Elijah,” she whispered up to him.

His name on her lips felt as warm as her hand on his chest. 

“Hmm,” he answered, looking off into the distance.

She rubbed his back. “You alright?” she asked quietly.

He looked down at her, then wrapped his arms around her tighter. 

“Yeah,” he said into her hair. He inhaled her scent—jasmine, rosewater, and vanilla.

Annie didn't push. Just let him stay in the moment a little longer, with her to hold onto.

Across the room, one of the church mothers cleared her throat entirely too loud, and just like that the tenderness snapped. Smoke and Annie both frowned, then looked over with expectant gazes. One cold, one more curious but still annoyed. The church mother’s mouth snapped shut and she scoffed, turning back around. Smoke and Annie both laughed as they walked towards the register, his arm around her shoulder.

“I’ma get an earful on Sunday ‘cause of you,” Annie joked, lacing her fingers with the ones hanging over her shoulder.

“They need to mind they own business,” Smoke said. Loudly. Right towards where they were congregating off to the side by the sheet music.

Their heads snapped over immediately.

Annie swatted his chest.

“What?”

“Lord,” she mumbled. “You was just tellin’ me to behave and you out here talkin’ crazy.”

“Tell the truth, shame the devil. Ain’t that what they say?”

“Smoke!” She tried swatting at him again. This time he caught her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. Annie rolled her eyes but she couldn’t stop a grin from spreading on her face.

“Nuh-uh,” his voice dropped low, right by her ear again. “You know my name.”

Her breath hitched.

“Mhmm,” he drawled.

They stepped to the register. 

“Find everything you were lookin’ for?” The clerk asked. 

The words sat between them. Smoke looked at Annie.

“Yeah,” Annie said. “Just this.”

“This a good record,” he remarked. “Classic.” He set the W.C. Handy record in its sleeve, then wrapped it twice in newspaper.

Annie listened.

“His band still play around town, in Tutwiler, and down in Mound Bayou.”

Smoke’s jaw clenched, then unclenched. Annie saw it. Saved it for later.

“Bayou?” she asked.

“Mound Bayou. All black town, just a little ways south of here,” the clerk remarked. 

Annie nodded curiously.

The clerk slipped the record in a brown paper bag. “That’ll be 75 cent.” 

Smoke had it in the man’s hand before Annie could pull out her pocketbook. He watched her hesitate and shot her a look that dared her to pull her own money out. That’s all she needed to see to keep her hand right where it was— wrapped tightly in his. 

Smoke kissed her hand again before grabbing the bag.

“Y’all have a nice day,” the clerk said.

They turned to leave a few minutes later, bags between them as they fell in step beside each other. They didn’t talk much, but their hands stayed laced, like they both needed to touch the piece of themselves they just shared. When they stepped out of the building and the noise of the street came back, the moment didn’t disappear. It just followed them out into the cold. The chilly air whipped wildly across their faces, but it did nothing to cool the heat rising between them, or the thrum that sat underneath all the tension.

A month went by, but not quietly.

The air got colder. November flew by like a gust of wind off the gulf where Annie used to catch crabs with her brothers when she was a little girl. The house got louder. Out of towners, people trying to get up North before the snow up there delayed the trains. Blackbird got busier. Annie kept storing her money in the tea tin that fit perfectly under the floorboard in her room. Soon she’d have to get a bigger one, she thought to herself. And find another hiding place.

Annie’s lessons with Aunt Della continued behind padlocked doors. 

Dress fittings at Luella’s became less frequent as her Harvest Party look came together. 

Smoke got busy, too. Quiet meetings on the outskirts of town. Trips to Memphis and business at Moon Lake. He came around the boarding house even more. This time he didn’t need to feign usefulness.

Meetings under the magnolia tree became their ritual. Every Sunday when the afternoon stretched its arms out into evening he’d come around back. Like clockwork, he’d show up, the side fence creaking open before he stepped through. They’d sit outside and talk until the mosquitos got too bad.

It became a place where they shared pieces of themselves. 

A place where ordinary conversation became sacred. 

Nellie, Pearline and Gigi squealed when she finally told them about Smoke. And time with them became more frequent too — nights, afternoons, or mornings in town before the roads got too crowded. 

As long as it didn’t touch Sunday night. 

Those belonged to Smoke.

“Louisiana,” Gigi started. Casual, like she was just asking about the weather. “You ain’t mounted that horse yet?” 

The words cut through the laughter, the sound of peas dropping in a bowl, even the phonograph that played soft jazz from the corner. Somebody choked mid-chuckle. Everybody turned to look at Annie, then froze. Three sets of eyes stared at her with a glittering curiosity that made her palms feel clammy in that moment. Gigi tapped her foot on the floor impatiently. Pearline fiddled with her hands. Nellie looked at Annie like she could read the answer in her face. But Annie wasn’t bothered. In fact, she was a little amused. This wasn’t a new question.

The four of them were sitting around the kitchen table after congregating at Nellie's house following their weekday bible study. Nellie’s mother took one long look at the four of them lounging around the front room and put them to work. She set a bowl and some peas on the kitchen table and walked out the room without another word. A pot of greens soaked on the counter. Pepper and onion sat chopped in a cast iron for later. Flour still sat in the cracks of the table from breakfast. 

She sighed softly. “No.” 

“Why not?” 

“She said she ain’t ready, y’all,” Pearline chimed in for her. “She say this every time y’all ask this question.” Then quieter. “It ain’t always like what them singers be goin’ on about.”

“Maybe not for you,” Gigi rebutted. “But you ain’t mountin’ a stallion.”

“More like a donkey,” Nellie joked.

Annie snorted. Even Pearline laughed under her breath. 

“So y’all just been kissin’?” Gigi probed.

“Mhmm.”

“You let him…touch you?” The question came from Nellie.

Her body flushed warm at the thought. Annie looked over to Nellie. “No.”

“Shame,” she sighed. “He look like he know what to do with his hands.” 

“Mhmm,” Gigi agreed.

“He should know,” Pearline said matter-of-factly. “Him and his brother done ran through half the town.”

“More than half,” Nellie muttered.

Annie sighed. Rolled her eyes.

“Stack more than Smoke,” Nellie confirmed. 

“Don’t I know it,” Annie replied.

“I heard Stack got a mean appetite,” Gigi said slyly.

That made Pearline gasp. “Gigi!” 

“What?” Gigi asked incredulously. 

“Please,” Pearline insisted in a hushed tone.

Annie shook her head. “Oh my God,” she protested. “I don’t need to hear this about my man’s brother.”

“Your maaaan,” Pearline teased playfully. Annie smiled.

“I heard Smoke manhood so big, it touches your soul,” Nellie said.

Annie’s head turned towards Nellie. “Who told you that?”

Nellie shrugged. “Is it true?” 

Annie shrugged.

“Every woman in town want a piece of them twins, I’m just surprised you ain’t took a bite yet.” 

“Not even a nibble?” Gigi asked. She looked shocked.

Annie chuckled low. “Not even a nibble.”

“But you seen it, though? Felt it? Backed up on him and let it poke you a little?”

“No,” she said. “I ain’t seen it.”

“But you felt it.” Gigi’s eyes grew wide. “It’s big ain’t it?” 

“He walk around like it’s big,” Nellie said plainly.

The room exploded with laughter, squeals, and giggles. Annie fumbled with a pea. 

“What’s big?” A voice rang out from the other room.

Nellie froze, then groaned and rolled her eyes when she realized who was talking.

“Awww don’t sound too happy to see me lil’ sis,” she continued. She stepped into the kitchen, t-strap heels clacking against the floorboards. Nice dress, nicer stockings, hair styled differently than Annie had seen in Clarksdale or New Orleans. Baby on her hip and another child at her waist, vice grip on his shirt like she was trying to keep him from running off or touching something he wasn’t supposed to.

Nellie rolled her eyes again and kept on shelling peas. “Hey Verity,” she said flatly. She looked up and her eyes softened when she saw her niece and nephew. “Look at how big you are!” she exclaimed. 

“Aunt Nellie!” 

Verity released the little boy and he ran over to give his aunt a hug. She adjusted her grip on her daughter, bouncing the babbling toddler on her hip. 

“Baby,” Verity said calmly with that mom warning underneath, “gon’ and help your daddy outside.”

The little boy rushed out the front door, leaving just the girls in an awkward silence before they quickly changed the subject. 

“Hey Verity,” Gigi and Pearline said together. Verity greeted them back, staring curiously at the stranger sitting at her mother’s kitchen table. 

“Verity,” Nellie started. “This is Annie, she’s new, from Louisiana. Annie, this is my sister Verity. She’s in town from Chicago.” 

Annie wiped off her hands on her apron and held out her hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, Verity.”

“Nice to meet you too, Verity. My goodness, you’re so pretty.” 

“Thank you,” Annie beamed.

Verity looked around the room. At each woman’s face individually. “What was y’all in here talkin’ about?” She asked like she’d already heard too much.

“Nothing,” Nellie said firmly.

Verity’s eyes narrowed.

“Men,” Gigi admitted bluntly.

Nellie shot her a look, to which she just shrugged and kept shelling her peas.

“What about ‘em?” Verity asked as her baby grabbed the collar of her dress. She untangled her fingers carefully while waiting for someone to say something.

“Annie here got herself a suitor already,” Nellie called out. “Smoke Moore.”

The look on Verity’s face said that she was busy putting a name to a face before it finally clicked. “Oh, one of the twins!” She wiped drool off her baby’s lips before it dripped on her clothes. “So they both came back from the war,” she remarked. “That’s good.”

Nellie rolled her eyes. “She done forgot about everybody she grew up with.” 

“Did not! They’re both so much younger than me.”

“You’re only 27.”

“And I been in Chicago for the past seven years,” she quipped. “How old are they now?”

“21,” Gigi answered.

“Babies,” she whispered, pinching her daughter’s cheek.

“Anyway, do you mind? Us babies,” Nellie said sarcastically, “tryna talk here. About somethin’ you don’t need to know nothin’ about.”  

Verity sighed. She was older, but still young enough to remember being where they were. Young and unmarried. Always being in a position to be told or met with judgment. Mostly from the women closest to her. 

She’d moved to Chicago and was met with a different type of perspective. The social scene was different, much different, probably something that’d make her mother clutch her pearls if she heard the lasciviousness that was considered normal, and that she had a taste of it before she met her husband. 

So, she knew all about flirtation and temptation. About men who only knew how to talk pretty, men who knew how to be tender, and men who confused possession with care. And behind the venom in her words, she could hear something more vulnerable in her little sister’s tone. So, she pulled up a chair at the table, put her baby between her legs, and went to work shelling peas. They worked together in silence for a while. Nothing except the occasional sigh, the sound of the baby hitting the table with her palms, and the house creaking and settling around them.

“Anyone else seein’ anybody new?” Verity asked.

Nobody replied. The air in the tiny kitchen held an uncomfortable type of tension. But it wasn’t anything unique. It was generational. A hesitance that usually exists in the gap between women just becoming and women who’d already been in their shoes. 

“How’s your husband, Pea?” 

Pearline cleared her throat. “He good,” she responded. She kept her head down while Verity looked at her knowingly. 

The front door practically flew open with all the energy of a hyper five-year-old boy. He took his shoes off by the door then ran down the hallway. 

Another person stepped in. His steps were much slower, but his energy was just as powerful in a measured, grown man kind of way. All six heads in the kitchen turned at once. Skin the color of chestnuts, bulky shoulders, broad chest, piercing light brown eyes that could stop a woman mid-sentence. He took off his hat to reveal a head full of low-cut slicked down hair. His three-piece suit matched the sharpness of Verity’s dress like a lid to a pot. He flashed a smile and damn near every woman at the table gulped hard. 

He waved his hand to greet everyone. “Hey y’all.” His voice was deep and gruff. A hint of southern twang in it, like the South had somehow rubbed off on him but he wasn’t born and bred here. 

“Hey,” everybody said back. 

Verity smiled, clearly unshaken by his presence because this was her husband. 

“Can you take the baby? She gettin’ fussy and I’m tryna help the girls with supper.”

“Sure.” He crossed the room to the kitchen and planted a kiss on her waiting forehead, then grabbed his daughter from her lap. 

“Thank you.”

“Hey sugar plum,” he cooed. He spoke softly to his daughter. She giggled and rested her head in the crook of his neck as he took her down the hallway.

Once they heard the click of a door shutting in the distance, the kitchen could finally exhale.

“That’s your husband?” Gigi asked breathlessly, looking towards the hallway like she needed him to reappear out of thin air. “Girl he is too fine!”

Verity grinned. “That’s my man,” she said proudly.

“Where you find him at?” Gigi continued. “And do he have any brothers?”

Annie kept her thoughts to herself as she snapped a pea under her thumb. While they sized him up her thoughts drifted over to Smoke. How his smile was easy when he showed it. How he didn’t show it to anybody but her. The way he’d walk in and suck the air out the room. The way his muscles filled out his clothing. Her breath sped up at the thought. She felt flushed. Hot all of a sudden, all over again.

Verity laughed at Gigi’s remarks and shook her head. “He do, but he’s the only good apple in the bunch.”

“Lord,” Annie chuckled.

Verity looked over at her expectantly.

“I got nothin’ but brothers,” she explained. “Got one, maybe two of them decent. The rest ain’t got the sense God gave a goose.” 

Everyone at the table laughed, the tension easing into something more relaxed. 

“It would take God and all his disciples to drill some decency into ‘em,” Pearline let slip out.

“Pearlie!” Nellie gasped at the revelation. Sweet little Pearline with her lace gloves, quiet eyes and her perfect posture like she was afraid that if she didn’t stand up perfectly straight someone would come behind her with a ruler to put her back in line. 

She shrugged casually, clearly pleased with herself. 

“Gigi,” Annie kept on shelling peas. “You ever see Will again?”

Gigi made a sound like she was vomiting and Annie broke out in laughter. 

“Verity,” she looked at her. “This man had the worst smelling feet I’ve ever smelled in my life!”

“Not smelly feet.”

“A horse’s hoof smells better than that man’s feet,” she grimaced. “Besides,” she smirked like her face held a secret she’d been dying to tell. Her voice got low. “I’ve been keepin’ company with Rodney again.”

“Not surprised,” Nellie mumbled.

“Who’s Rodney?” Annie asked.

Nellie answered for her. “Just the man she been stuck on since we was kids.”

“Ohh….” 

“I ain’t stuck. He’s just familiar.”

“More like that hmmhmm” she gave the table a knowing look, “is familiar.”

“Hush!” Gigi swatted Nellie’s shoulder. “It’s reliable.”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with goin’ back to an ol’ reliable.” Annie whipped her head around. The voice came from Verity.

“That’s right,” Gigi agreed smugly.

“Annie ain’t even done nothin’ with that twin of hers yet.” 

Annie rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

“Why not?” Verity asked.

She huffed a small breath out her nose. “Just waitin’ for the right time.” 

“You waitin’ til the party huh?” Gigi asked with a grin. “All that liquor runnin’ through you will loosen you right on up,” she teased.

Annie shook her head, laughing.

Pearline spoke up quietly. “Don’t let the liquor make you do anything you don’t wanna do.”

“I ain’t,” Annie said.

“You keep it for yourself until you good and ready to give it away.”

“Exactly,” Pearline said. “And if he really cares, he won’t mind. Not one bit.”

“My husband waited a whole year for me to let him in. Didn’t pressure me. Didn’t make me feel bad. Didn’t make it ‘bout his needs,” Verity recalled. “What matters is what he does when wantin’ you, means he gotta take it slow.”

Her words landed. 

“Do he know?” Her voice was small. Pearline’s. “That you a virgin?”

Annie exhaled sharply. “I ain’t told him,” she confessed. 

Pearline spoke again. “And…he ain’t tried nothin’?” 

“We ain’t been alone like that,” she said softly while fumbling with the hem of her apron. “And I ain’t found the right time to tell him yet.”

“He gon’ wear you out once he get his hands on you,” Gigi said dramatically. “You know that right?”

“I believe it.” And she did.

“Whew, chile,” Nellie drawled. “I’ma say a prayer for you. And for your—” 

“Eleanor!” Verity snapped.

Annie snorted.

Verity looked over at Annie, eyes warm. “You’ll find the right time,” she assured.

The kitchen was a little quieter after that. Just the sound of knuckles cracking, shells snapping open, peas hitting the bottom of the bowl, throaty jazz still coming from the corner. And a glaring question that hummed underneath the noise. 

“Do you want to…you know, with him?” Pearline asked.

Annie stopped shelling for a moment and looked to the side to collect the whirlwind of thoughts that spun around in her head. 

Her and Smoke had been having outings. Not running into each other by chance, not catching a glimpse across the sidewalk. Together. In public. On purpose. It was mostly whatever it was she wanted to do. Smoke liked it that way.

They tucked into their own little routine as what was blossoming between them slowly became familiar. Since her conversation with Aunt Della she hadn’t taken the time to sit down and think about what exactly it was or where it was going to go. All she knew is that in this new rhythm with him…it felt right. 

He’d touch her gently. Carefully. Like he was holding onto something fragile. But even the slightest contact sent shivers down her spine. 

A hand at the small of her back.

He’d lean in close when he needed to say something to her. Always did.

But sometimes he’d drop his mouth right by her ear just to hear her gasp under her breath.

He’d wrap his hands around her waist and she swore she forgot how to breathe. 

But she didn’t move away.

His desire for her was palpable. 

He was hungry. 

She could see it in his eyes and feel it in his restraint. 

But he was tender with her, like he was dousing his own desire until she was ready to cross that bridge, and that ignited her curiosity for more like a spark lit in a dry room.

She knew she was in trouble when she started to notice the absence of certain things. His closeness. His touch. The feeling that came from it.

She thought about his mouth a lot. What it felt like pressed against hers. The way his tongue would trace the seam of her lips like a man standing at a threshold, waiting to be invited in. 

Her thoughts usually stopped there because they were too overwhelming. 

Kissing wasn’t new to her. Desire wasn’t either. Not entirely. 

She’d heard things. Sensed them. She wasn’t naive in an ignorant way. 

But as the baby of the family, and the only girl, she’d been crowded. She was always loved and protected. But love and protection always felt like being watched and managed by people who assumed they knew what was best for her.  

Then Smoke came along. He unsettled her because he didn’t hover. He waited. With his quiet attention and something deeper that sat underneath the surface. 

He listened.

He chose her. 

He made space for her to choose herself. 

And for a girl who spent her whole life being guarded, space felt dangerous. 

It felt like freedom. 

Freedom to be held but not held back.

She wanted to step into it, the new version of herself that was emerging from sheltered beginnings.

Craved it.

Craved him.

Badly. 

Even though she didn't fully know what that meant, she wanted to be close. Wanted to experience everything that came along with that closeness.

And it wasn’t just a physical thing. It was a primal, desperate ache that rose from the depths and swept through her body, hitting every single nerve ending along the way.

She even started dreaming about him. It was always the same one. She’d wake up in a mess of her own making—nightgown clinging to her curves, sheets damp. Then she’d spend the rest of the day feeling a dizzying pulse between her legs, like her heart had found a new home there.

It was like his soul had floated to hers while she was sleeping, and wanted to make sure she was ready for the day she finally just...let go. 

He didn’t need to know what was said.

Didn’t even need to know who said it.

Smoke drove with both hands on the wheel, grip steady on the leather. The door of the Colored schoolhouse swung open in its hinges before fitting into its frame, and he walked through the threshold with a quiet determination. He wasn’t there to argue. He was there to be clear; to shut an old door he never meant to leave cracked open in the first place.

The kids were long gone. All that remained was the ghost of their feet shuffling against the floorboards and the echo of high-pitched laughter. And her. She sat at the desk at the front of the classroom with a stack of papers and a thick red pencil, making straight lines across words with clean, even strokes, and just the right amount of pressure. 

Sunlight cut across the empty desks, catching the chalk dust that still hovered in the air. The classroom was quiet, but it wasn’t empty. History, resentment, and two different versions of the truth hung between the two of them like a physical weight that made the room feel smaller. It pressed against the walls and the lone window on the side of the building like it could feel the tension brewing and wanted out.

Smoke cleared his throat. 

She scoffed. A quiet, annoyed expulsion of breath. Then she looked up, and when her eyes met his they held his gaze, then went up and down his form slowly. Canvassing, maybe. Taking in the seriousness in his posture. Taking notice of the cold calm he carried.

“Demetria.” Smoke’s voice was cold too, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. It usually was. But this kind of cold was more resolve than anything. 

“Smoke,” she said back. 

“We need to talk.”

“Well, hello to you too,” she said sharply.

“Hey,” he said. “We need to talk,” he repeated, tone flat.

She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “About?” she asked with a challenge in her tone.

“Us.”

The word made her lean forward on her elbows. 

“I just came to say we’re done. For good this time,” he said firmly. He opened his mouth, then closed it, like he had something more to say but decided against it. 

“That’s it?” The look on her face went from amusement to surprise to something else in the span of a few seconds. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

“I’m sorry it took so long for me to say out loud. I should have said it sooner. That’s on me. But we been done a while. You know that.”

“You always did think silence was kinder than the truth,” she fired back. 

Smoke hung his head. Because she wasn’t wrong. Her anger, he could take on the chest. He at least owed her that. 

“Look, I don’t know what’s been said or who you been sayin’ it to,” he started. “But whatever’s been said, I’m here to put it to rest.” 

Something flashed across her face and left just as quickly. Recognition. And the sinking feeling of dread. “You must got somebody you care about a whole lot, to come all the way over here just so you could say it plain,” she said. “She know about me?” 

“I’m sayin’ it now,” he said, voice low. 

“Does she know about me?” She asked again. A little louder this time.

Smoke’s jaw ticked. 

“So there is somebody else,” she said carefully.

Smoke didn’t answer. 

She studied his face for anything— regret, sadness, anything. She closed her eyes to keep her composure and shook her head like it would somehow make the sting go away. It didn’t. But she put her dignity back on anyway.

“Well,” she said, almost breathless. “There it is.”

Smoke nodded once. Demetria looked at him like she couldn’t recognize the shape of the man standing in front of her anymore, then she went back to her papers with the same measured carefulness she always used. The force of her pen made the paper crackle on the desk. Her corrections felt more personal now. Like she was trying to cross him out of her life one red line at a time.

“You take care.”

“Or not,” she snapped.

Smoke nodded like he accepted the ire, then he turned towards the entrance. He walked into the cool Mississippi air outside and away from the tension that sat between them, ready to snap like a rubber band pulled taut. And when he closed the door to the schoolhouse behind him, he made sure it shut all the way.

“Mwen kontan.” 

She said it in such a sultry, whispery tone. Not on purpose, that’s just how Annie’s voice sounded to Smoke. Alluring and fragrant, like the scent of the magnolia blossoms scattered around them on the ground. 

It was an early Sunday evening in November. The magnolia tree that stood tall on the side of the boarding house was changing. Its delicate, white petals drifted loose from the branches overhead and fell soft into the yard like the last bit of summer was shedding itself, piece by piece.

They sat on her patchwork quilt under the remaining shade of the tree. Annie had her knees tucked beneath her, her new sketchbook open on her lap. Smoke was across from her, one knee up, forearm casually resting over it. His eyes were anything but casual, narrowed with a fierce concentration. A lantern sat close by the edge of the quilt. Its flame burned low and steady, painting gold shadows over the pages of Annie’s sketchbook and the tips of her fingers.

“Hold on,” Smoke fussed. “You gotta say it slower.” 

Annie chuckled. “Mweh con-tan,” she sounded out slowly.

Smoke was staring at her lips, trying to mimic the way she formed the words when she spoke. She was amused by his focus. Impressed. He had it in everything he did. That bitter resolve. 

“What that mean?” 

“It means I’m happy.”

“Mwen-kun-tin,” he tried.

Annie winced. “Close, but…just try it again,” she urged.

“No,” Smoke said flatly.

“Why not?”

“I said it just how you said it.”

“No,” Annie shook her head. “You didn’t.” 

Smoke’s mouth twitched. He looked away before it could fully turn into a smile. “Sounded close enough to me,” he grumbled. 

“Mweh con-tan,” she said slower.

“Mwen kun-tan,” he repeated.

Annie bit the inside of her cheek. He was doing it on purpose, with his stubborn self. 

“You laughin’ at me?” Smoke asked bitterly.

“No.”

“Yeah…you are.”

“Am not.”

A magnolia petal landed on the page. Smoke picked it up without thinking, turned it once in his hand, then placed it on the quilt like he was afraid to hold it too long for fear he’d crush it in his hands. 

“Say it again.”

“You’re enjoyin’ this too much,” he huffed.

“And you bein’ difficult on purpose.”

“Mm.”

“Mm,” she said louder. She laughed softly and shaded something with her pencil near the corner of the page. It was a sketch of the shape of his mouth. Just the corner and how it curved around the sound he kept getting wrong. How he’d pushed a nasal sound outward instead of dropping it down.

Smoke shifted closer by a fraction, looking down to the sketchbook curiously. “Can I see?”

Her fingers tightened around it out of instinct. 

“You ain’t got to.”

The gentleness in his words made her look up. Made her grip loosen. She turned the sketchbook towards him, setting it between them. On the page wasn’t just one drawing. There were several spread across the paper. The curve of a leaf. The twist of a root. The slope of a hand pouring tea. Felix curled up on the porch. Halfway tucked in the pages was a loose leaf drawing of the inside of a small house. Smoke stared at that one the longest. He knew instantly what it was. He’d seen her sketch of the outside of her shop before. But this one was different.  She pulled it out from where it was wedged and placed it in her lap. 

Bundles hanging from the ceiling on one side. 

A long counter in front. 

A curtain that led to other rooms. 

Small jars lined up neatly on shelves. 

He took in every section, every detail. 

“Your shop,” he said finally.

“One day,” Annie replied shyly. 

“One day, when?” 

Annie looked up. “When I got enough saved. When I know enough,” she listed off. “When Aunt Della thinks I’m ready. When…” she huffed out a breath softly. “When the world lets me, I guess.”

Smoke’s jaw worked. 

“It wouldn’t just be remedies,” she said, rushing to fill the quiet before it got too loud. “I’d sell teas, salves, tonics, food, too. It wouldn’t just be a shop,” she continued, searching for words that would land. “It’d be somewhere people can come when they got things they ain’t ready to say out loud, but they ready to stop lettin’ it hurt them.” 

Smoke kept quiet beside her. 

Annie took a deep breath. “My grandma had an apothecary. Nothin’ fancy,” she said softly. “Just a place where people came in whisperin’ and left breathin’ easier.”

Smoke watched her. Her eyes, the way they softened around certain words. Her hands, and how they fidgeted on the edge of the paper. He looked at the page again while she ran her finger lightly over the built-in shelves she drew. 

“I want that. Somethin’ with my name on it. Somethin’ I know how to keep.” 

He looked at her again. “You will,” he said firmly. 

The certainty in his voice made her go still. “You sound sure.”

“I am.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you.”

Annie tucked the drawing away and closed her sketchbook halfway, her hand smoothing over its cover. “You know some of me.”

Smoke nodded once. “I know enough.”

Silence settled between them again. Easy. Annie watched him for a moment, trying to read what had changed in his face. He looked the same mostly. Quiet. Steady. Shoulders still carrying that heaviness. But his eyes looked different.

He sat up straight and faced her. “Annie.” He said her name and she felt her heart thump hard in her chest. She couldn’t figure out why. He’d said her name a million times, but he’d never said it quite like this.

“Yes?” she replied. 

“I talked to your aunt.”

“About what?”

“You.”

The night moved around them. Crickets chirping in the trees, distant voices from a house down the street. Dogs barking, chickens roosting. It all seemed to quiet around this very moment.

“I told her I wanna court you. Proper.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

“And now?” she asked quietly.

“Now I’m comin’ to you.” 

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, eyes piercing. “I ain’t askin’ you for nothin’ you don’t wanna give,” he said. “And I ain’t askin’ you to stop what you been showin’ me.” 

Annie’s throat tightened. “That matter to you?”

Smoke’s eyes moved to the sketchbook, then back to her. “It matters to you,” he said plainly. “It matters to me.”

“I thought you ain’t believe in all that stuff,” she said. “Hoodoo.” 

“I don’t.” He shrugged. “I believe in you.” 

Annie drew in a small breath, tilting her chin up a little. “What does courtin’ mean to you?”

Smoke took his time to answer.  

“It means I come correct. I don’t sneak around corners with you. Don’t have folks guessin’ what you mean to me.  It means if I spend time with you, it’s cause I’m serious about you.” 

“You are?” 

“I am.”

She looked at him— a silent urge to keep talking, like he wasn’t already undoing her under this magnolia tree.

“I ain’t sayin’ I got everything figured out. I don’t. I got work that ain’t clean. I got Stack.” His mouth tightened faintly. “And I got things I still need to make right before I can ask for more than this.”

He sighed. “But I know what I mean,” he said. “And I don’t mean to waste your time.” 

Annie looked down at the sketchbook in her lap. This man, whose words always held weight, had looked closely at her dreams sketched in graphite and smudged lines and simply said —he wanted to be part of them. 

She looked back at him. “If I say yes,” she said slowly. “I want my shop. I want my work. I want…I wanna be somebody outside of who I’m with.” 

“You already are,” he said, voice low.

Annie blinked.

His voice stayed low. “I ain’t askin’ to make you smaller.”

Annie’s breath caught. “Then what you askin’?”

He paused for a moment, then— “To walk beside you while you grow.” 

The silence that sat between them wasn’t empty. It was so full that Annie had to look away just so she could breathe. 

That’s when she felt it.

A nervous laugh.

It rose up in her throat— not because anything was funny, but because the weight of this moment was so heavy, she had to lighten it somehow before it swallowed her whole. She tried to suppress it, but the corners of her mouth had already turned up.

“You laughin’ at me?”

He noticed. Of course he did.

“No!”

Smoke’s mouth twitched. “Yes you are.”

“No I’m not!”

“You a bad liar.”

“I'm not lyin'...you just...makin’ me nervous right now,” she admitted softly.

His eyes softened. “You can take your time to think about it.”

Annie shook her head immediately. “No,” she said. “I don’t need time,” she assured him. 

His eyes got serious again.

“I’ll let you court me.”

Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. Something much more dangerous to her composure. “Yeah?”

Annie’s lips curved into a fully encompassing smile that spread gently across her face. “Yeah.” 

He held out his hand for her. A question. She put her hand in his and they laced their fingers together carefully, palms warm and steady against each other. The answer.

The tree shed another petal. It drifted down between them and landed on their intertwined hands. They didn’t move it. The lantern burned low. They sat like that beneath the magnolia tree as the last of summer continued to fall around them.

The next morning was a blur. Between the demands of empty stomachs and the nervous tremor of her own hands, a nagging anxiety sat on her shoulders and butterflies fluttered violently in the pit of her belly. A sigh of relief left her lips as the last lodger headed out the door, leaving her and Aunt Della to at least be able to clean up the kitchen and dining room in a tempered silence. 

The wind chimes on the porch fluttered in the breeze, whistling a throaty, breathless jingle that did nothing to calm her nerves. Aunt Della glanced her way a few times, but said nothing. Even Felix tried to soothe her, his purrs doing little to bring her any real solace. 

Annie shoved a biscuit in her mouth to give herself something to do. The warm fluffiness filled her mouth and the butter satisfied her tastebuds with its rich, melty goodness. She sighed then took another bite, closing her eyes as the sustenance moved through her body.

Maybe she was just hungry. And maybe her anxiousness had nothing to do with him.

She moved quicker, stacking, sweeping, wiping, scraping until the house smelled like eucalyptus, lavender, and bleach.

Annie collapsed on the couch in the front room, but not from exhaustion. From adrenaline that had nowhere else to go. Her heart beat rapidly and she fingered her ileke beads like that could somehow calm it. Morning light cut warm and light through the front windows like a balm on her skin. She tilted her head back and let her eyes close, basking in the quiet after the chaos of breakfast. 

The scent of tobacco, peppermint, and bay rum floated through the screen door. Slowly—like the rich, layered smells that arrive in a kitchen when meat, butter and herbs fold into each other on the stove.

Then the screen door cracked open and Smoke stepped through. 

Annie’s mouth went dry.

The first thing she noticed was the way he darkened the doorway once he stepped past the threshold. He was tall, well over six feet. Large and imposing frame, and even though she was a tall woman herself, it felt like he towered over her. The muscles on his arms and shoulders filled out every inch of his white collared shirt, pressing against the starched fabric with a powerful, restrained strength. His suspenders held up trousers that sat comfortably around his hips. His boots were heavy on his feet even though his steps were light. It was a subtle contradiction that made her tongue feel like cotton in her mouth. 

The second thing she noticed were the flowers in his hand. Two separate arrangements— one a mixture of white, cream, and greenery. The other was a mixture of vivid colors that looked like a rainbow painted the petals. Each was wrapped in brown paper and tied gently with twine.

Smoke removed his hat and turned to see Annie spread lazily across the couch. Apron halfway untied, scarf to the side, legs hanging off the edge, dress tracing the curve of her hips. She looked beautiful with her feet dangling in the air, bent nickel hanging loosely off a string around her left ankle, shoulders relaxed like she didn’t have a care in the world. He liked that look. Wanted to see more of it.

He was doing that staring thing again, Annie thought to herself. The way his eyes slowly swept up and down her body gave her goosebumps, and she suddenly became very aware of how she was presenting. Worn dress, apron smudged with stains, hair fuzzy in her cornrows, barefoot and lounging on the couch. But the heat in his eyes turned a casual glance-over into a smoldering glare that pinned her in place. The paper around the bouquets crinkled under his grasp as he adjusted them in his hand. When his voice finally broke the loaded silence that had overtaken the front room of the boarding house, it was rough with something that made her spine snap straight. Her legs followed, then her hands, dragging her upwards until she was sitting up completely.

“Good mornin’.” 

Annie smiled up at him, a sight that beamed brighter than the morning sun. “Good mornin’.”

Smoke took a step closer, then two, and with one hand grabbed the white bouquet out of his other and extended them towards Annie. “For you.”

“Thank you,” she said, inhaling their scent. 

Smoke nodded once, then looked around the room. “Where’s your aunt?”

“Somewhere out back,” she said breathily, taking another sniff of the flowers. 

“These for her.”

“Awww, ain’t you sweet?”

“Don’t tell nobody,” he said in that low register that made her skin tingle, with a timbre that told her he wasn’t joking even though the corner of his mouth lifted when he said it. 

He proceeded into the kitchen then out the back door, leaving Annie with her own thoughts and the absence of…him. His presence stayed in the room even though he was gone, and it wasn’t just because the smell of his cologne lingered behind. Her head tilted when she realized what day it was. Monday. What was he doing here?

“What we doin’ today?” He asked as he stepped back into her space.

Annie’s breath stuttered.

Aunt Della listened in from the kitchen, looking entirely pleased with herself. 

Annie cleared her throat and shut her mouth that had opened at Smoke’s words. Not because she wasn’t used to him being forward. But because the look in his eye told her he was dead serious when he asked her that question.

“I gotta stop by Chow’s,” she started, to which he acknowledged with a nod. “Then the drugstore,” she continued. She listed things off until she stopped to look down at what she needed to do before anything else. “I gotta wash up first. Change.” 

“I’ma be right here,” he assured her, sinking deep into the couch, putting his head back, and spreading his legs. 

Annie took one more look at him and darted up the stairs.

Thirty minutes later she was in front of the mirror, blouse tucked into a halfway-fastened skirt. Her hair was taken down from her cornrows, oiled, greased, parted down the middle, and pulled back. 

Except one piece that just wouldn’t lay flat. 

She brushed it once, then brushed it again. It refused to lay right, refused to stay right. Her hairbrush clattered on the dresser where she dropped it. 

“What am I doing?” she asked like the walls could talk back. 

She gripped the edge of the dresser, then touched the open edge of her blouse still unbuttoned at the throat. Her fingers rested there a moment before she remembered to button it. 

Her fingers weren’t steady. She cursed under her breath, buttoning it with trembling hands. She smoothed the front down, turning to the side to make sure it was tucked all the way in. 

Then she picked up her hairbrush again. Went over the same spot. Got the same result. 

She threw her hairbrush down with frustration, flustered. 

All of a sudden she felt very alone. More alone than she’d felt since she got to Clarksdale. She tried to blink away the tears but one escaped her eye. It rolled down her cheek, dropping onto her dresser. 

She missed her friends from home. 

She missed her family.  

She didn't expect this. Didn’t expect him. 

And now she was standing in the middle of something new surrounded by people who barely knew her. No mama who always knew what to say. No brothers teasing. No daddy who would pretend it wasn’t making him emotional seeing his little girl stepping into her role as a woman.

Maybe it was a sign. 

She didn’t know what she was doing. She couldn’t even get her hair right without falling apart.

What did she know about being courted?

The word felt strange in her throat. New. Like a dress made out of fine fabric that she hadn’t yet learned how to move in. Like something she wanted to be careful with, to not wrinkle. Something she wanted to spin in front of the mirror just to see how it caught the light. 

And maybe, just maybe….if it fit just right, she could keep it.

Her stomach fluttered. 

She didn’t know what came after she said yes.

She’d heard stories from her friends back home, but she was never in the thick of it to look around and see how it felt. 

She didn’t know how close she was supposed to stand beside him, what folks would hear if he said her name too soft. Didn’t know if holding his hand would feel natural or if she’d overthink every step. She didn’t know what part of herself was meant to stay guarded and what part was allowed to lean.

But between the frustration, and the fear, and the homesickness that had a vice grip on her nerves…she still wanted to try.

That was the part that kept resurfacing.

She wanted it. Wanted him beside her. Wanted to be beside him. And she wanted folks to see.

The truth of it rose up so plainly, it didn’t leave room for her to argue with herself about it.

She wanted to know what Smoke looked like when he didn’t hold himself back so much. Wanted to learn what his quiet felt like when it belonged to her. Wanted to see if walking beside him in the daylight felt like sitting beside him under the magnolia tree in the backyard.

She rubbed her ileke beads and let the touch ground her. Then she put some oil on her fingers, the special blend her mama made that halfway leaked out in her trunk, and brushed the worrisome part of her hair the way her mama always did when she got too frustrated to do it herself. Rub, smooth, brush, set. 

She looked in the small, age-spotted mirror again, and her mouth curved up into a small, winsome smile.

Maybe she didn't know what she was doing.

But maybe the only thing she needed to do today was walk downstairs, meet his eyes, and take it one step at a time.

The floorboards upstairs groaned and Smoke’s head snapped towards the sound. He rose slowly from his spot on the couch, keeping his eyes trained on Annie as she walked down the stairs with a hand on the banister. 

His gaze moved over her. 

She wore a deep mustard-colored blouse tucked into a navy blue ankle-length skirt and high button leather boots. Her purse was slung over her shoulder and her skin still looked warm from her bath.

“You look nice.” 

“Thank you.”

“Real nice.”

Annie’s cheeks warmed. 

“Ready?” he asked.

Annie smiled once she got to the bottom of the staircase. “I’m ready.” 

Aunt Della stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the front room, arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes went from Smoke to Annie and back. “Y’all don’t have too much fun out there,” she smirked. “And watch my baby,” she said to Smoke.

“I will,” Smoke said as he put his hat back. He opened the door for Annie and stepped back to turn to Aunt Della. “Always.” 

Aunt Della shook her head playfully and turned back to the kitchen, arms still folded but a grin on her lips. 

The ride over to Fourth Street was quick—just two short blocks. People in front of Chow’s Grocery were few and far between, but the sidewalk was far from empty. Outside, business moved as usual. A vendor restocked produce while a worker inspected their freshness. A few customers left the store with items wrapped tightly in brown paper while their children skipped alongside them with peppermint sticks and molasses chews in hand. Wagons trekked by slowly with mounds of cotton in the back, and the constant hammering of picks chipping ice blocks apart echoed in the street.

Smoke rounded the front of his truck to open the door for Annie. He held up a hand for her to balance herself on and took care to make sure she was steady once she stepped out. He followed behind her as they walked to the entrance, his hand on the small of her back as he held the door for her.

The inside held the sweet pungency of chicory in burlap sacks being hauled from the back and piled high by the windows. Charles and Bo Chow stood behind the front counter, Charles weighing something on the scale while Bo wrote an entry in the ledger. A smirk spread across Bo’s face when he saw Smoke and Annie at the door and clocked their closeness. He nodded at Smoke, then slid his eyes over to Annie and waved at her, drawn by the warmth that always seemed to radiate off her. 

“Baby,” Smoke started, exchanging a look with Bo. “I need to go holler at Bo real quick.”

“Okay,” Annie responded in that sweet, syrupy Louisiana drawl of hers.

She drifted across the store looking at her list, then made her way down one of the aisles in search of something else entirely. Smoke watched her go, watched her disappear, replayed it in his head. Then he turned to Bo. He was wiping down a display as Charles rang up a customer at the till.

“How you been, man?” Bo asked.

“Good, good,” Smoke said. He greeted him with a firm handshake, then pulled back to get a good look at him. “Damn, fatherhood huh?”

“I look that bad?”

“You look like shit.”

Bo laughed, the corner of his eyes crinkling with it. He looked tired, but content in a way that made his eyes twinkle. Like he was at peace despite it all. “Tired as hell. But I’m happy,” he nodded. “We happy.” 

“I’m happy for you, Bo.”

“Thanks man,” Bo replied, shaking Smoke’s shoulder. His eyes flicked over the store. “Della’s girl…that’s you?”

“You mean Annie,” Smoke corrected. 

Surprise overtook Bo’s face and he raised an eyebrow. A question. “Yeah, I mean Annie.”

“Yeah,” he answered. Firm. “She mine.”

Bo clapped Smoke on the shoulder, looking at him with a sense of shock and awe. “Oh shit,” he exclaimed, putting a fist in front of his mouth. “Look at you, fixin’ to be in my shoes soon, Smoke.”

Smoke shot him a look as he walked away, but something in him got quiet when the thought crossed his mind. Then it got warm.

Annie, a mother.

Him. 

A father.

He shook the thought away just as quickly when they became poisoned by thoughts of his own father. 

That felt like a metaphor for his own life— innocence being corrupted by its own blood.

The thought of being a father after putting his own in the ground felt devastatingly ironic, but hope flickered somewhere that maybe it could rewrite whatever went wrong with his own.

He shook his head and kept walking through the store, his legs carrying him past the aisles in slow, measured steps. He didn’t rush. He knew exactly where Annie was. 

Annie was still reeling. 

From him calling her baby. From the way he said it with that deep Mississippi drawl. Her cheeks were warm, skin flushed, and all of a sudden, everything felt hot despite the store being cool.

She stood in the aisle, humming under her breath, half bent over as she flipped through a wire basket on a shelf filled with seed packets. 

“Why she want this when we got it in the backyard?” She fussed. 

She shook her head, plucked the seed packet from the stack, and stood up. They dropped into her shopping basket as she walked further down the aisle. She picked up the small bag of feed and saw a shadow out of the corner of her eye. She ignored it and went about her business crossing items off her list when she heard it.

“Hey stranger.”

She turned around.

Reverend Carter stepped around the corner.

Red button up, brown tweed waistcoat, gold pocket watch hanging. And that silver signet ring that he rubbed with the pad of his thumb. She looked down in his shopping basket and her brows knit at the contents inside. 

Her lips tightened into a line, that same odd sense of familiarity crept up on her again and made her insides tumble with unease. 

“Hey.” She adjusted the strap of her purse around her shoulder.

A grin spread across his face. “How you been?”

“Good,” she nodded. “You?”

Carter nodded like he was choosing his words carefully. “I’ve been doin’ just fine,” he said slowly.

Annie shifted her weight. “So you’re back?”

“For a little.” 

She blinked. “Where you speakin’ at this time?”

“Church off Yazoo,” he said quickly.

She frowned for a second, then relaxed her face. 

Carter chuckled under his breath. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You stayin’ at the house?”

He smirked to the side then looked back. “I’m stayin’ with the pastor.”

“Makes sense.” 

“Yeah…makes perfect sense.”

His eyes dropped to her ileke beads, then back up. The glance was quick, barely even noticeable. But she did. The hand that wasn’t holding her basket rose to touch her beads protectively. 

Smoke noticed it too. 

He was at the top of the aisle, watching.

He saw Carter’s eyes dip to her chest. It was just a brief second, but the flicker made his chest tighten. 

He crossed the aisle in three long strides. He kept his eyes forward, locked on Carter who had sensed him looming and had since looked up from Annie. 

Smoke stepped behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist, the motion tucking her into his side. The gesture was smooth, natural, like her body had no business not being there all along.

Annie let out a quiet exhale. It was a short, controlled breath that made her shoulders relax.

Then she moved—but she didn’t move so much as melt. She relaxed back into Smoke’s touch, folding easily into him. His fingers curled around her hip, but his eyes didn’t leave Carter’s.

“Afternoon,” Carter said politely to Smoke.

Smoke just stared at him, his dark hooded eyes like black orbs piercing into the depths of whatever lay behind Carter’s. No nod. No acknowledgement. Just a cold, tactical assessment.

Carter blinked. “Y’all goin’ to the Harvest Party next month?”

“Yeah,” Annie replied quickly. She felt Smoke’s grip tighten on her hip.“We—”

“What business a preacher got at a juke joint?” Smoke asked, voice flat.

“I ain’t goin’,” Carter said, rubbing his signet ring. He looked down at it, then looked back up at them. “Just tryna make conversation.”

Smoke and Annie glanced at each other out of the corner of their eyes. 

“Well,” he said, tipping his hat. “Y’all have a good rest of your day.” 

Then he walked away.

The bustle of Chow’s went on around them but they didn’t hear it— like they only existed now in their own little bubble. Then Smoke dipped his head to her ear and pressed his lips there.

Three short kisses. Soft despite the intensity of the feeling behind them. Warm, from the closeness and something else entirely. They felt less like a kiss and more like a claim.

One right behind the ear, one lower on the skin right above the neck, and one right on the shell. His nose nuzzled there for a second before he opened his mouth and hummed right into her ear. Low, deep, right into the part of her ear that made his voice vibrate right down her spine. 

“You good?” 

“Mhmm,” she hummed.

She looked over her shoulder at him and his eyes were closed at the sound of her voice. She stroked his beard and his eyes opened to find hers darker. Her fingers grazed the shell of his ear. A gentle touch that made him fight off a shiver. 

“Behave,” he said, squeezing her hip gently.

Annie grinned. She turned away from his grasp and slinked out of the aisle like nothing happened. Then she glanced over her shoulder at him once more to bat her eyes at him before slipping completely out of his sight. Smoke stood there watching her walk away, his body still warm from where she rested against it. He flexed his hands at his sides to subdue the fire she stoked in him, then followed behind her.

Outside, the air smelled like spice and the bite of the chilly November air. Annie adjusted the paper-wrapped bundle from Chow’s against her hip and slipped it into her purse. Smoke stepped out behind her with the chicken feed sack tucked under his arm and the rest of Aunt Della’s order in his other hand like it weighed nothing. He watched a shiver run down Annie’s spine that she tried to hide.

“Cold?”

“A little.”

“Here.”

Smoke shrugged off his jacket and laid it over Annie’s shoulders as they walked towards his truck. The smell wafting from King’s Tamales Stand next door stopped Annie in her tracks as a man working the booth shouted his prices to folks passing by and wrapped hot tamales in paper. Warm masa, spice, meat steamed softly inside of corn husks. Steam curled up from a heavy pot blackened by use and hit the inside of the tin roof of the stand that had a crooked hand-painted sign attached to the front.

Smoke glanced at Annie. “Hungry?” 

Annie looked at him with those wide brown eyes of hers. Then her stomach answered before she got the chance. She scoffed, looking down at it like it betrayed her thoughts, then back up at Smoke. 

Smoke’s mouth twitched. “Come on.” He shifted the sack higher beneath his arm and stepped towards the stand. “How many you want?” 

“One.”

“Just one?”

Smoke looked towards the tamale man. “We’ll take four.”

Annie blinked. “Four?”

Smoke looked back at Annie. “I’m hungry, too.” 

The man behind the stand grinned like he’d seen this before. “Two for the gentleman, one for the lady now, and one for when she gets hungry later.”

“Exactly,” Smoke agreed.

Annie scoffed, looking away before a smile broke out on her face.

“Hot?” the man asked.

Smoke looked back at Annie again. She lifted her chin, offended despite herself. “Hot.”

Smoke looked back to the grinning man and nodded once. “Hot.”

“You think I wouldn’t like hot?”

“I didn’t know that’s why I asked.”

“You forget where I’m from?”

“I remember.”

The tamales came wrapped in paper, steam rising as the man passed them over to Smoke. He paid, coins dropping clean in the man’s palm. “Enjoy,” he said as they turned down the sidewalk. 

They walked a little ways down the side of the building, stopping by a patch of shade where the street noise softened around them. Smoke set Aunt Della’s things carefully by his feet, then handed Annie her tamales. He unwrapped his own with easy hands. Annie watched him without meaning to. The way he carefully peeled back the husk. The way the steam curled around his fingers. The way he took the first bite and let it sit in his mouth before he started chewing. He chewed once, twice, then nodded faintly to himself. 

“That good?”

“Mhmm.” He took another bite. 

Annie unwrapped hers, holding it carefully between her fingers as the heat bled through the paper. The first bite was soft and smoky. The cornmeal was tender, but not enough to fall through her fingers. The meat was rich with salt, pepper, and something earthy underneath. She chewed thoughtfully, her mouth analyzing every flavor. Smoke was already on his second tamale, but was chewing slower now, watching her. 

“What?” she asked.

“You makin’ a face.”

“I’m thinkin’.”

Smoke’s brows knit together. “About a tamale?”

“Mhmm.”

His mouth curved. “That so?”

“Absolutely.”

She took another bite, slower this time. “It’s good.”

Smoke nodded but kept his eyes trained on her for the—

“But.”

“I knew it.”

Annie smiled faintly. “It could use a lil’ more depth.”

“Depth?”

She nodded. “Depth.”

Smoke looked down at his half-eaten tamale then back up at Annie. “It’s a tamale.”

“And?”

Smoke looked amused now. He tilted his head. “What would you do to it?”

Annie shifted her weight. “I’d give it somethin’ to round out the pepper,” she said. “So it don’t just sit on top.”

Smoke just looked at her. “You always this particular?”

“With food? Yes.”

“And everything else?”

Annie opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked down at her tamale, then back at him. And when she spoke, her words came out softer than she expected them. “I know what I like.”

Smoke’s gaze hadn’t left her. “Good.” He took another bite, slowly. The cornmeal broke apart clean between his teeth. A long chunk of saucy meat landed on his tongue and he slurped it down his mouth without breaking eye contact.

“You starin’.”

Annie blinked. “Am not.”

“What you lookin’ at then?”

“You got somethin’ on your face.”

He ran a hand through his beard. “For real?” 

“It’s gone now.”

He couldn’t ignore the mirth in her eyes. She looked away, unwrapping the last tamale with more attention than it needed. The corner of Smoke’s mouth lifted. 

“Where I’m from, folks put more life into they food,” she said, turning back to him.

“More life?”

“Yep.”

“What that mean?”

“It means…” she said, looking towards the street like she could find the words there. “Food should taste like somebody remembered where they came from when they made it.”

“You sayin’ the people who made this…forgot where they came from?”

“No.” She smiled into her food. “They just knew wherever they was goin’ didn’t like it hot!”

Smoke huffed a laugh. Fourth Street moved around them, unconcerned. And the tension from inside of Chow’s softened into something easier. Something with steam, spice, and a little more kick. 

“I’ll make sure to let King know.”

Annie swatted his chest. “Smoke, don’t you dare!” 

When they were done eating, Smoke gathered Aunt Della’s order again and Annie threw the empty wrappers into a nearby waste barrel. She wiped her fingers against her handkerchief, the taste of pepper and cornmeal still heavy on her tongue. 

They left their items from Chow’s locked in Smoke’s truck, which he left in front of the grocery store at Annie’s insistence. Annie enjoyed the scenery as they walked leisurely towards the next stop on her list of errands. Smoke enjoyed the scenery too— her. Her hair, tucked into a thick bun, had tendrils hanging down the sides of her face that blew with the wind. One kept sticking to the shell of her ear, tickling her when it hit just right. The beads tucked under the neckline of her dress rattled if she moved a certain way. And she still had his jacket on to shield her from the wind. The sight of her walking around with his suit jacket draped over her shoulders did something to him that he couldn’t explain and didn’t want to. 

They neared the crossroad where Fourth Street met Issaquena, the street lined with shops for personal and grooming services. Luella’s Dressing Room & Alterations, Ritzy’s Beauty Salon, Brown’s Barbershop, and others sat along a row of close-knit brick and wooden storefronts with mended awnings and handmade signs.

The noise of the street got louder as they approached the block where Luella’s and Ritzy’s stood across from the barbershop. Or maybe it was just the noise in Annie’s head. She walked closest to the sidewalk with Smoke right beside her, watching her closely. His hand would find her lower back if he saw her steps falter or slow. They dodged some kids roughhousing, a stand or a low hanging sign, a crack in the sidewalk.

The area in front of the barbershop was full of men standing on lampposts smoking cigarettes, people watching, and chatting each other up. Suspenders loose or off, hats sitting low, legs bent, feet on the brick barbershop building while they waited their turn. The striped pole outside spun slowly with the wind. The smell of shaving soap, pomade, and hot comb smoke drifted upwards from the barbershop and the beauty salon across the street. The men outside let their eyes wander when Annie approached them on the sidewalk— and froze when they saw Smoke right next to her. Conversations paused, necks craned slowly. Smoke guided her through the crowd that parted for them with his hand at her back. The men acknowledged him, some giving him daps, others giving a firm nod. Some said a few polite words, tipping their hats and greeting them both as they walked by. But Smoke kept his hands on Annie. Always on her. 

Sunflower Music was painted in gold lettering on a black wooden sign that hung perpendicular to the sidewalk. The awning was a muted red, the color faded by the sun and wear, and stuck out of a narrow brick storefront with tall display windows in the front. Folks walking by would just stop and stare at what was inside— sheet music, instruments, phonographs, a lone Columbia Graphophone. Stacks of records displayed like treasure. Once the shop bell guided them through the door, the smell of paper, varnished wood, and cigars turned the crisp winter air to something with more bite. The space was long and spread out. Wooden floors. Pressed-tin ceiling. Ceiling fans turning slowly overhead. Most of the displays were spread out across the walls except a few items that were secured behind glass cases and oak cabinets shined to a mirror finish. 

A musician tested out strings by the wall where the instruments were displayed. A few church mothers Annie recognized from First Baptist Missionary were flipping carefully through church hymn sheet music displayed in stands on the other side of the shop. 

The owner stood by one of many phonographs with a record in his hands. He placed it in one, cranked the machine, and dropped the needle, all in one smooth, practiced motion. The customer standing next to him waited for the beat to drop. The record spun, the sound cracked slightly, then the smooth sound of a brass band spread throughout the room. Annie paused. The customer bopped his head to the fast-paced, soulful music coming from the phonograph speakers. 

Then the cornet solo hit.

Annie stilled entirely. 

The sound of conversation faded away, even the pointed looks of the church mothers who recognized her walking hand-in-hand with Smoke, she paid no mind. The familiarity of the music made her chest twist painfully. It sounded like home. Felt like it too. Like street musicians, second line parades, and rain hitting tin roofs during summer storms. 

“Annie?” he asked, voice low. He touched the small of her back.

Once she caught her breath, she whispered, “Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she replied, blinking back the tear that threatened to drop from her left eye. “Just reminds me of home.” She blinked and she could see it clearly. A rickety old shack. The fierce, stubborn, woman who lived inside who felt more like a spirit than a memory. “My great-grandmama,” she said a little softer. “Before she passed…she loved listening to the cornet. I don’t know why but that was the only instrument that made her face light up no matter how out of it she was.”

Smoke rubbed her lower back and they moved deeper in the store but Annie felt like she was walking through water. They ended up by the stack of records which stood close to the instruments along the wall. 

“That’s the thing about music,” he said. “It has a way of bringin’ you back to somebody, even after they long gone.”

Annie exhaled sharply. She went through the Vaudeville records but she wasn’t really looking. Smoke stood by her side, facing her, waiting. 

“We lost her to the hurricane. Back in ‘15.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“She wouldn’t leave.” Her voice cracked. 

“What you mean?”

Annie took a deep breath.

“She lived deep in the bayou. Water filled with gators,” she chuckled, shaking her head. “She knew the storm was comin’ before it did. Said if the water’s fixin’ to take her she ain’t gon’ run.” 

Annie looked towards the window like the memory called her there for some reason. “She said she had somebody on the other side waitin’ on her.” 

Smoke nodded once, eyes patient. “You know who?”

“No,” she said. “She was sold downriver ‘fo she could remember anyone.”

“Damn,” Smoke whispered. 

She smiled. It was faint, like it was pushing through the grief. “She was alone her whole life…’til she started having babies.”

“How many?”

“Fourteen.”

Smoke whistled low.

Annie hummed. “She was somethin’ else.”

The memory of her great-grandmother flashed quickly through her mind like a blur. Eyes that looked different…older than her age, and much younger at the same time. Her frail hands dragging a stick through swamp mud, leaving marks that looked less drawn than remembered.

“What was her name?”

Annie blinked and it was gone. Her hand rose to her ileke beads again, then she looked up at Smoke with the softest, widest, brown eyes, and the tenderness in them made him sigh. 

“Antoinette,” she said finally. Like the name pulled something out of her that made her hesitate to say it out loud.

Smoke rubbed her shoulder, pulled her close and kissed the top of her head. 

Annie put a hand on his chest, leaning into his touch. 

They let the silence sit between them for a few moments. Let the quiet ache until it dulled into something easier to move on from.

“Anyway,” she said finally, pulling herself together. “Let’s get what I came here for.” Her fingers walked the records in search of the ragtime one Aunt Della wanted.

“What kinda music they listen to, over there in France?”

“They liked a lot of the stuff we brought over.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Our regiment had a band and everything.” 

“Were you in it?” She teased.

His mouth twitched. “Nah.” 

The musician testing out guitars hit a chord with a slider that made Smoke’s hand tap once against the record box before he caught himself. He looked at Annie and she was already looking at him. 

“What?” he asked.

Annie arched her brow. “You like that?”

“It’s nice.”

“Why?”

Smoke exhaled. “It’s slow. Got a little ache to it.”

Annie chuckled low.

The guitar player took his slider off and played something a little louder, a little faster, a deep Blues riff.

“You like this one, too?” 

“This more Stack’s style.”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“What?”

“It’s more Stack’s style but your hand been tappin’ away since he started playin’.” 

Smoke looked down at his hand then back to Annie. “Don’t mean I can’t enjoy it.”

“You right,” she smirked. “But you tappin’ along like you know this song by heart.”

“I do.” 

Annie frowned. “From where?”

“My daddy.” He paused. Looked down. Sighed. “He played the guitar.”

“Oh,” she mouthed. She heard something in his words even though his voice was steady. Pain. Shame. Guilt. Loss. Whatever it was, it weighed heavy.

His jaw tightened. “Back then…” he drifted off. “The music felt kinder than the man.” His eyes found her again.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

Annie rubbed his arm, then pulled it around her. The gesture made his shoulders relax, and she wrapped her arms around his chest. “Elijah,” she whispered up to him.

His name on her lips felt as warm as her hand on his chest. 

“Hmm,” he answered, looking off into the distance.

She rubbed his back. “You alright?” she asked quietly.

He looked down at her, then wrapped his arms around her tighter. 

“Yeah,” he said into her hair. He inhaled her scent—jasmine, rosewater, and vanilla.

Annie didn't push. Just let him stay in the moment a little longer, with her to hold onto.

Across the room, one of the church mothers cleared her throat entirely too loud, and just like that the tenderness snapped. Smoke and Annie both frowned, then looked over with expectant gazes. One cold, one more curious but still annoyed. The church mother’s mouth snapped shut and she scoffed, turning back around. Smoke and Annie both laughed as they walked towards the register, his arm around her shoulder.

“I’ma get an earful on Sunday ‘cause of you,” Annie joked, lacing her fingers with the ones hanging over her shoulder.

“They need to mind they own business,” Smoke said. Loudly. Right towards where they were congregating off to the side by the sheet music.

Their heads snapped over immediately.

Annie swatted his chest.

“What?”

“Lord,” she mumbled. “You was just tellin’ me to behave and you out here talkin’ crazy.”

“Tell the truth, shame the devil. Ain’t that what they say?”

“Smoke!” She tried swatting at him again. This time he caught her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. Annie rolled her eyes but she couldn’t stop a grin from spreading on her face.

“Nuh-uh,” his voice dropped low, right by her ear again. “You know my name.”

Her breath hitched.

“Mhmm,” he drawled.

They stepped to the register. 

“Find everything you were lookin’ for?” The clerk asked. 

The words sat between them. Smoke looked at Annie.

“Yeah,” Annie said. “Just this.”

“This a good record,” he remarked. “Classic.” He set the W.C. Handy record in its sleeve, then wrapped it twice in newspaper.

Annie listened.

“His band still play around town, in Tutwiler, and down in Mound Bayou.”

Smoke’s jaw clenched, then unclenched. Annie saw it. Saved it for later.

“Bayou?” she asked.

“Mound Bayou. All black town, just a little ways south of here,” the clerk remarked. 

Annie nodded curiously.

The clerk slipped the record in a brown paper bag. “That’ll be 75 cent.” 

Smoke had it in the man’s hand before Annie could pull out her pocketbook. He watched her hesitate and shot her a look that dared her to pull her own money out. That’s all she needed to see to keep her hand right where it was— wrapped tightly in his. 

Smoke kissed her hand again before grabbing the bag.

“Y’all have a nice day,” the clerk said.

They turned to leave a few minutes later, bags between them as they fell in step beside each other. They didn’t talk much, but their hands stayed laced, like they both needed to touch the piece of themselves they just shared. When they stepped out of the building and the noise of the street came back, the moment didn’t disappear. It just followed them out into the cold. The chilly air whipped wildly across their faces, but it did nothing to cool the heat rising between them, or the thrum that sat underneath all the tension.

A month went by, but not quietly.

The air got colder. November flew by like a gust of wind off the gulf where Annie used to catch crabs with her brothers when she was a little girl. The house got louder. Out of towners, people trying to get up North before the snow up there delayed the trains. Blackbird got busier. Annie kept storing her money in the tea tin that fit perfectly under the floorboard in her room. Soon she’d have to get a bigger one, she thought to herself. And find another hiding place.

Annie’s lessons with Aunt Della continued behind padlocked doors. 

Dress fittings at Luella’s became less frequent as her Harvest Party look came together. 

Smoke got busy, too. Quiet meetings on the outskirts of town. Trips to Memphis and business at Moon Lake. He came around the boarding house even more. This time he didn’t need to feign usefulness.

Meetings under the magnolia tree became their ritual. Every Sunday when the afternoon stretched its arms out into evening he’d come around back. Like clockwork, he’d show up, the side fence creaking open before he stepped through. They’d sit outside and talk until the mosquitos got too bad.

It became a place where they shared pieces of themselves. 

A place where ordinary conversation became sacred. 

Nellie, Pearline and Gigi squealed when she finally told them about Smoke. And time with them became more frequent too — nights, afternoons, or mornings in town before the roads got too crowded. 

As long as it didn’t touch Sunday night. 

Those belonged to Smoke.

“Louisiana,” Gigi started. Casual, like she was just asking about the weather. “You ain’t mounted that horse yet?” 

The words cut through the laughter, the sound of peas dropping in a bowl, even the phonograph that played soft jazz from the corner. Somebody choked mid-chuckle. Everybody turned to look at Annie, then froze. Three sets of eyes stared at her with a glittering curiosity that made her palms feel clammy in that moment. Gigi tapped her foot on the floor impatiently. Pearline fiddled with her hands. Nellie looked at Annie like she could read the answer in her face. But Annie wasn’t bothered. In fact, she was a little amused. This wasn’t a new question.

The four of them were sitting around the kitchen table after congregating at Nellie's house following their weekday bible study. Nellie’s mother took one long look at the four of them lounging around the front room and put them to work. She set a bowl and some peas on the kitchen table and walked out the room without another word. A pot of greens soaked on the counter. Pepper and onion sat chopped in a cast iron for later. Flour still sat in the cracks of the table from breakfast. 

She sighed softly. “No.” 

“Why not?” 

“She said she ain’t ready, y’all,” Pearline chimed in for her. “She say this every time y’all ask this question.” Then quieter. “It ain’t always like what them singers be goin’ on about.”

“Maybe not for you,” Gigi rebutted. “But you ain’t mountin’ a stallion.”

“More like a donkey,” Nellie joked.

Annie snorted. Even Pearline laughed under her breath. 

“So y’all just been kissin’?” Gigi probed.

“Mhmm.”

“You let him…touch you?” The question came from Nellie.

Her body flushed warm at the thought. Annie looked over to Nellie. “No.”

“Shame,” she sighed. “He look like he know what to do with his hands.” 

“Mhmm,” Gigi agreed.

“He should know,” Pearline said matter-of-factly. “Him and his brother done ran through half the town.”

“More than half,” Nellie muttered.

Annie sighed. Rolled her eyes.

“Stack more than Smoke,” Nellie confirmed. 

“Don’t I know it,” Annie replied.

“I heard Stack got a mean appetite,” Gigi said slyly.

That made Pearline gasp. “Gigi!” 

“What?” Gigi asked incredulously. 

“Please,” Pearline insisted in a hushed tone.

Annie shook her head. “Oh my God,” she protested. “I don’t need to hear this about my man’s brother.”

“Your maaaan,” Pearline teased playfully. Annie smiled.

“I heard Smoke manhood so big, it touches your soul,” Nellie said.

Annie’s head turned towards Nellie. “Who told you that?”

Nellie shrugged. “Is it true?” 

Annie shrugged.

“Every woman in town want a piece of them twins, I’m just surprised you ain’t took a bite yet.” 

“Not even a nibble?” Gigi asked. She looked shocked.

Annie chuckled low. “Not even a nibble.”

“But you seen it, though? Felt it? Backed up on him and let it poke you a little?”

“No,” she said. “I ain’t seen it.”

“But you felt it.” Gigi’s eyes grew wide. “It’s big ain’t it?” 

“He walk around like it’s big,” Nellie said plainly.

The room exploded with laughter, squeals, and giggles. Annie fumbled with a pea. 

“What’s big?” A voice rang out from the other room.

Nellie froze, then groaned and rolled her eyes when she realized who was talking.

“Awww don’t sound too happy to see me lil’ sis,” she continued. She stepped into the kitchen, t-strap heels clacking against the floorboards. Nice dress, nicer stockings, hair styled differently than Annie had seen in Clarksdale or New Orleans. Baby on her hip and another child at her waist, vice grip on his shirt like she was trying to keep him from running off or touching something he wasn’t supposed to.

Nellie rolled her eyes again and kept on shelling peas. “Hey Verity,” she said flatly. She looked up and her eyes softened when she saw her niece and nephew. “Look at how big you are!” she exclaimed. 

“Aunt Nellie!” 

Verity released the little boy and he ran over to give his aunt a hug. She adjusted her grip on her daughter, bouncing the babbling toddler on her hip. 

“Baby,” Verity said calmly with that mom warning underneath, “gon’ and help your daddy outside.”

The little boy rushed out the front door, leaving just the girls in an awkward silence before they quickly changed the subject. 

“Hey Verity,” Gigi and Pearline said together. Verity greeted them back, staring curiously at the stranger sitting at her mother’s kitchen table. 

“Verity,” Nellie started. “This is Annie, she’s new, from Louisiana. Annie, this is my sister Verity. She’s in town from Chicago.” 

Annie wiped off her hands on her apron and held out her hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, Verity.”

“Nice to meet you too, Verity. My goodness, you’re so pretty.” 

“Thank you,” Annie beamed.

Verity looked around the room. At each woman’s face individually. “What was y’all in here talkin’ about?” She asked like she’d already heard too much.

“Nothing,” Nellie said firmly.

Verity’s eyes narrowed.

“Men,” Gigi admitted bluntly.

Nellie shot her a look, to which she just shrugged and kept shelling her peas.

“What about ‘em?” Verity asked as her baby grabbed the collar of her dress. She untangled her fingers carefully while waiting for someone to say something.

“Annie here got herself a suitor already,” Nellie called out. “Smoke Moore.”

The look on Verity’s face said that she was busy putting a name to a face before it finally clicked. “Oh, one of the twins!” She wiped drool off her baby’s lips before it dripped on her clothes. “So they both came back from the war,” she remarked. “That’s good.”

Nellie rolled her eyes. “She done forgot about everybody she grew up with.” 

“Did not! They’re both so much younger than me.”

“You’re only 27.”

“And I been in Chicago for the past seven years,” she quipped. “How old are they now?”

“21,” Gigi answered.

“Babies,” she whispered, pinching her daughter’s cheek.

“Anyway, do you mind? Us babies,” Nellie said sarcastically, “tryna talk here. About somethin’ you don’t need to know nothin’ about.”  

Verity sighed. She was older, but still young enough to remember being where they were. Young and unmarried. Always being in a position to be told or met with judgment. Mostly from the women closest to her. 

She’d moved to Chicago and was met with a different type of perspective. The social scene was different, much different, probably something that’d make her mother clutch her pearls if she heard the lasciviousness that was considered normal, and that she had a taste of it before she met her husband. 

So, she knew all about flirtation and temptation. About men who only knew how to talk pretty, men who knew how to be tender, and men who confused possession with care. And behind the venom in her words, she could hear something more vulnerable in her little sister’s tone. So, she pulled up a chair at the table, put her baby between her legs, and went to work shelling peas. They worked together in silence for a while. Nothing except the occasional sigh, the sound of the baby hitting the table with her palms, and the house creaking and settling around them.

“Anyone else seein’ anybody new?” Verity asked.

Nobody replied. The air in the tiny kitchen held an uncomfortable type of tension. But it wasn’t anything unique. It was generational. A hesitance that usually exists in the gap between women just becoming and women who’d already been in their shoes. 

“How’s your husband, Pea?” 

Pearline cleared her throat. “He good,” she responded. She kept her head down while Verity looked at her knowingly. 

The front door practically flew open with all the energy of a hyper five-year-old boy. He took his shoes off by the door then ran down the hallway. 

Another person stepped in. His steps were much slower, but his energy was just as powerful in a measured, grown man kind of way. All six heads in the kitchen turned at once. Skin the color of chestnuts, bulky shoulders, broad chest, piercing light brown eyes that could stop a woman mid-sentence. He took off his hat to reveal a head full of low-cut slicked down hair. His three-piece suit matched the sharpness of Verity’s dress like a lid to a pot. He flashed a smile and damn near every woman at the table gulped hard. 

He waved his hand to greet everyone. “Hey y’all.” His voice was deep and gruff. A hint of southern twang in it, like the South had somehow rubbed off on him but he wasn’t born and bred here. 

“Hey,” everybody said back. 

Verity smiled, clearly unshaken by his presence because this was her husband. 

“Can you take the baby? She gettin’ fussy and I’m tryna help the girls with supper.”

“Sure.” He crossed the room to the kitchen and planted a kiss on her waiting forehead, then grabbed his daughter from her lap. 

“Thank you.”

“Hey sugar plum,” he cooed. He spoke softly to his daughter. She giggled and rested her head in the crook of his neck as he took her down the hallway.

Once they heard the click of a door shutting in the distance, the kitchen could finally exhale.

“That’s your husband?” Gigi asked breathlessly, looking towards the hallway like she needed him to reappear out of thin air. “Girl he is too fine!”

Verity grinned. “That’s my man,” she said proudly.

“Where you find him at?” Gigi continued. “And do he have any brothers?”

Annie kept her thoughts to herself as she snapped a pea under her thumb. While they sized him up her thoughts drifted over to Smoke. How his smile was easy when he showed it. How he didn’t show it to anybody but her. The way he’d walk in and suck the air out the room. The way his muscles filled out his clothing. Her breath sped up at the thought. She felt flushed. Hot all of a sudden, all over again.

Verity laughed at Gigi’s remarks and shook her head. “He do, but he’s the only good apple in the bunch.”

“Lord,” Annie chuckled.

Verity looked over at her expectantly.

“I got nothin’ but brothers,” she explained. “Got one, maybe two of them decent. The rest ain’t got the sense God gave a goose.” 

Everyone at the table laughed, the tension easing into something more relaxed. 

“It would take God and all his disciples to drill some decency into ‘em,” Pearline let slip out.

“Pearlie!” Nellie gasped at the revelation. Sweet little Pearline with her lace gloves, quiet eyes and her perfect posture like she was afraid that if she didn’t stand up perfectly straight someone would come behind her with a ruler to put her back in line. 

She shrugged casually, clearly pleased with herself. 

“Gigi,” Annie kept on shelling peas. “You ever see Will again?”

Gigi made a sound like she was vomiting and Annie broke out in laughter. 

“Verity,” she looked at her. “This man had the worst smelling feet I’ve ever smelled in my life!”

“Not smelly feet.”

“A horse’s hoof smells better than that man’s feet,” she grimaced. “Besides,” she smirked like her face held a secret she’d been dying to tell. Her voice got low. “I’ve been keepin’ company with Rodney again.”

“Not surprised,” Nellie mumbled.

“Who’s Rodney?” Annie asked.

Nellie answered for her. “Just the man she been stuck on since we was kids.”

“Ohh….” 

“I ain’t stuck. He’s just familiar.”

“More like that hmmhmm” she gave the table a knowing look, “is familiar.”

“Hush!” Gigi swatted Nellie’s shoulder. “It’s reliable.”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with goin’ back to an ol’ reliable.” Annie whipped her head around. The voice came from Verity.

“That’s right,” Gigi agreed smugly.

“Annie ain’t even done nothin’ with that twin of hers yet.” 

Annie rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

“Why not?” Verity asked.

She huffed a small breath out her nose. “Just waitin’ for the right time.” 

“You waitin’ til the party huh?” Gigi asked with a grin. “All that liquor runnin’ through you will loosen you right on up,” she teased.

Annie shook her head, laughing.

Pearline spoke up quietly. “Don’t let the liquor make you do anything you don’t wanna do.”

“I ain’t,” Annie said.

“You keep it for yourself until you good and ready to give it away.”

“Exactly,” Pearline said. “And if he really cares, he won’t mind. Not one bit.”

“My husband waited a whole year for me to let him in. Didn’t pressure me. Didn’t make me feel bad. Didn’t make it ‘bout his needs,” Verity recalled. “What matters is what he does when wantin’ you, means he gotta take it slow.”

Her words landed. 

“Do he know?” Her voice was small. Pearline’s. “That you a virgin?”

Annie exhaled sharply. “I ain’t told him,” she confessed. 

Pearline spoke again. “And…he ain’t tried nothin’?” 

“We ain’t been alone like that,” she said softly while fumbling with the hem of her apron. “And I ain’t found the right time to tell him yet.”

“He gon’ wear you out once he get his hands on you,” Gigi said dramatically. “You know that right?”

“I believe it.” And she did.

“Whew, chile,” Nellie drawled. “I’ma say a prayer for you. And for your—” 

“Eleanor!” Verity snapped.

Annie snorted.

Verity looked over at Annie, eyes warm. “You’ll find the right time,” she assured.

The kitchen was a little quieter after that. Just the sound of knuckles cracking, shells snapping open, peas hitting the bottom of the bowl, throaty jazz still coming from the corner. And a glaring question that hummed underneath the noise. 

“Do you want to…you know, with him?” Pearline asked.

Annie stopped shelling for a moment and looked to the side to collect the whirlwind of thoughts that spun around in her head. 

Her and Smoke had been having outings. Not running into each other by chance, not catching a glimpse across the sidewalk. Together. In public. On purpose. It was mostly whatever it was she wanted to do. Smoke liked it that way.

They tucked into their own little routine as what was blossoming between them slowly became familiar. Since her conversation with Aunt Della she hadn’t taken the time to sit down and think about what exactly it was or where it was going to go. All she knew is that in this new rhythm with him…it felt right. 

He’d touch her gently. Carefully. Like he was holding onto something fragile. But even the slightest contact sent shivers down her spine. 

A hand at the small of her back.

He’d lean in close when he needed to say something to her. Always did.

But sometimes he’d drop his mouth right by her ear just to hear her gasp under her breath.

He’d wrap his hands around her waist and she swore she forgot how to breathe. 

But she didn’t move away.

His desire for her was palpable. 

He was hungry. 

She could see it in his eyes and feel it in his restraint. 

But he was tender with her, like he was dousing his own desire until she was ready to cross that bridge, and that ignited her curiosity for more like a spark lit in a dry room.

She knew she was in trouble when she started to notice the absence of certain things. His closeness. His touch. The feeling that came from it.

She thought about his mouth a lot. What it felt like pressed against hers. The way his tongue would trace the seam of her lips like a man standing at a threshold, waiting to be invited in. 

Her thoughts usually stopped there because they were too overwhelming. 

Kissing wasn’t new to her. Desire wasn’t either. Not entirely. 

She’d heard things. Sensed them. She wasn’t naive in an ignorant way. 

But as the baby of the family, and the only girl, she’d been crowded. She was always loved and protected. But love and protection always felt like being watched and managed by people who assumed they knew what was best for her.  

Then Smoke came along. He unsettled her because he didn’t hover. He waited. With his quiet attention and something deeper that sat underneath the surface. 

He listened.

He chose her. 

He made space for her to choose herself. 

And for a girl who spent her whole life being guarded, space felt dangerous. 

It felt like freedom. 

Freedom to be held but not held back.

She wanted to step into it, the new version of herself that was emerging from sheltered beginnings.

Craved it.

Craved him.

Badly. 

Even though she didn't fully know what that meant, she wanted to be close. Wanted to experience everything that came along with that closeness.

And it wasn’t just a physical thing. It was a primal, desperate ache that rose from the depths and swept through her body, hitting every single nerve ending along the way.

She even started dreaming about him. It was always the same one. She’d wake up in a mess of her own making—nightgown clinging to her curves, sheets damp. Then she’d spend the rest of the day feeling a dizzying pulse between her legs, like her heart had found a new home there.

It was like his soul had floated to hers while she was sleeping, and wanted to make sure she was ready for the day she finally just...let go. 

The scream tore out of her throat and vanished into the trees.

Remmick moved. 

Not like a man. 

Like something slipping through the dark between moments, his body bending forward, jaw split wide, fangs bared as he lunged for her with a hunger that had waited centuries.

Amelia stumbled back, hands flying up on instinct. 

“Don’t—!”

Her light answered before her mind could. It burst from her palms in a wild, unshaped flare gold and white and flickering blue. Like fire that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be yet. It struck him full in the chest. 

Remmick hissed—sharp—his body snapping back as the light burned across his raggedy coat, searing through fabric, biting into skin beneath. Smoke curled from him, thin and bitter.

But…it didn’t stop him. It only made him laugh. A broken, delighted sound clawed up from his chest as he straightened, eyes glowing red now, brighter…hungrier. 

“There it is,” he rasped, “there it is…show me again.” 

Amelia’s breath hitched. Her hands trembled as she tried to summon it again—tried to shape it, control it—but it flickered, unstable. Too bright one second. Gone the next. 

“I don’t—” she gasped, “I don’t know how—”

Remmick stalked closer. 

“You don’t need to know,” he spoke softly, hauntingly, “you just need to bleed.”

Remmick lunged again—

And the forest split. Not with sound. With light. 

A clean, violent beam cut through the dark wilderness, cold and focused, nothing like Amelia’s wild glow. It struck Remmick from the side with surgical precision, blasting him backward into a tree so hard the trunk cracked.

The woods went eerily still. Even Amelia’s breath caught in her chest. 

Remmick hit the ground hard, smoke rising from his skin, body twitching as something ancient and furious stirred beneath the burn. 

Then, a voice followed. Calm. Measured. Unmoved. As if the forest itself was speaking. 

“You hunt too loud, fanger.” 

Amelia turned. 

She hadn’t seen her arrive. One moment the trees were empty. Then the next, she was there. 

Virelle stood just beyond the reach of the scattered light, her figure still and composed like she had stepped out of the night itself. No rush. No panic. 

Her gaze flicked once to Amelia. Sharp. Assessing. Then, back to Remmick.

“Still clingin’ to scraps in foreign soil,” Virelle said, almost bored, “you grow desperate.” 

Remmick rose slowly, head tilting, lips curling back into something feral. 

“…Virelle,” he breathed, recognition slipping into his tone like a blade. “Didn’t think they still sent watchers this far south.” 

“They don’t,” she replied. “I came on my own.” 

Amelia’s pulse roared in her ears. She didn’t understand what was happening, who this woman was, but her fae knew. Something older than fear. Something that said she wasn’t an enemy, but not safe either. 

Remmick wiped at the burn on his chest, his fingers coming away dark. 

“And this one yours?” He asked, nodding toward Amelia. “Little halflin’ glowing in the woods like o’ dinner bell?” 

Virelle didn’t answer. Her eyes shifted to Amelia again, taking in the trembling hands, the unstable light flickering beneath her skin, the grief still clinging to her like damp cloth. 

“You flare too loud, little girl. You sure you Lysara’s offspring?” Virelle said simply. 

The words landed like a bolder to her chest. Harder than any comfort could have. 

Then—

Remmick moved again. Faster. Angrier. 

Virelle remained still. 

Her hand lifted, just slightly, and the light answered her like it had been waiting. 

Controlled. 

It shot forward in a narrow, blinding arc and struck Remmick mid-lunge, snapping his body sideways and driving him across the forest floor in a violent drag of dirt and bark. He roared this time, no laughter in it now. Virelle stepped forward once, that was all. But the ground shifted beneath her feet. The light collapsed in on itself and everything went dark. For a single breath, Ameila couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel the ground. Couldn’t hear the forest. Only the echo of her own pulse. 

Then, they were somewhere else. Cooler. Thicker. Deeper into the woods where the trees grew taller and the moonlight barely touched the ground. No sign of Remmick. No broken bark. No scorched earth. 

Amelia staggered, catching herself against a tree, long hair frizzy and wild, dress dirty, face covered in dry tear streaks and sweat. Eyes blurry. Fingers tingling after the light that burst out in flickers. 

“Wha—” she choked. “What was that—where—”

Virelle stood a few paces away, untouched, unbothered, uninterested. She watched Amelia like a problem she hadn’t decided how to solve yet. 

“That,” Virelle said. “Was what’s been sniffin’ at your heels since you crossed into this place.” 

Ameila shook her head, trembling. “He—he said he was gon—”

“Yes,” Virelle cut in. “He was.” 

Amelia’s light flickered again but weak. Exhausted. Virelle’s gaze dropped to her hands, then back up to her face. 

“You don’t know how to use it.” She said. 

Amelia swallowed hard. “I…I tried—”

“You panicked.” 

“I was about to be killed!” 

“And you nearly handed yourself over.” 

Virelle’s words were cold. Clean. Unforgiving. No room for understanding. Ameila flinched like she’d been struck. Virelle stepped closer, enough now that Amelia could see her clearly. The stillness in her. The absence of fear. And her fae stirred. 

“You don’t understand what you are.” Virelle said. “And because of that…everything around you suffers for it.” 

Amelia’s chest tightened. “Who are you?” 

A pause. Then…

“Someone who’s been watching you burn everything you touch.” 

Amelia’s breath hitched. 

Somewhere far off, deep in the trees they’d left behind, a low, furious howl echoed. 

Remmick. 

He was still alive. Ready to hunt again. Virelle didn’t bother acknowledging the sound of Remmick’s ferocity, but her eyes sharpened. 

“He’ll come again,” she said. 

Amelia’s lungs burned as she tried to steady her breathing. 

It wasn’t working. 

Her chest rose too fast. Her hands trembled. That light inside her that was usually a low hum felt raw now. Scraped open like it had been dragged out of her without warning and didn’t know how to settle back into place. 

“You gon’ stand there staring at me like I ain’t almost just died?” Her voice cracked, sharp with fear and anger. “Or you gon’ tell me what the yell is goin’ on?” 

Virelle stood with her weight balanced evenly, hands relaxed at her sides, eyes fixed on Amelia like she was studying something fragile and inconvenient at the same time. 

It made Amelia’s skin crawl.

“Who are you?” Amelia pressed, stepping forward. “And how you just do that? Where we at? What was that thing—”

“A vampire.” Virelle said. 

Amelia blinked. “A what?” 

“A predator,” Virelle continued, as if Amelia hadn’t spoken. “Older than most things that walk this land. Drawn to power. To blood. To anything that burns bright enough to be worth the trouble.”

Amelia shook her head, frustration rising fast. “That don’t explain you.” 

“No,” Virelle said. “It doesn’t.”

Amelia’s jaw tightened. “Then explain it.” 

Virelle’s gaze shifted slightly, dragging over Amelia’s face, her trembling hands, the faint flicker still dancing beneath her skin.

“You’re unstable.” 

Amelia flinched. “What?” 

“You heard me.” 

A sharp breath left her.

“I got chased through the woods by some—some thing tryin’ to eat me and that’s what you got to say?” 

“What I have to say,” Virelle replied, voice even, “is that you are loud, untrained, and careless with a power you don’t understand. That makes you dangerous. Not just to yourself.” 

Amelia stared at her, stunned. 

“You don’t know me,” Amelia said.

“I know enough.” 

“Then say it!” Amelia snapped, emotion breaking through. “Say what you think you know ‘bout me!” 

Virelle took on step closer. 

“You don’t know what you are, she said. “But you feel it. Every time your emotions spike. Every time someone gets too close. Every time you want something badly enough to bend the world around you.” 

Amelia’s throat tightened. “That ain’t—”

“You killed a man.” 

Ameila staggered back like she’d been struck.

“I didn’t mean to kill Nathaniel. It was an accident—”

“You still did it.” 

Virelle’s voice didn’t rise or accuse. It just…stated. 

Amelia’s eyes burned. “I lost control. I told you that. I didn’t know what was happenin’ to me.” 

Virelle’s expression didn’t change. 

“You led him into the water. You let your emotions climb. And your light answered. You wanted to kill him and your fae gave you the push you needed to do it.”

Amelia shook her head, tears spilling now. 

“I…It just…it happened.” 

“Keep selling that lie to yourself Amelia to make you feel better.” The quiet in Virelle’s tone was suffocating. “You don’t direct it. You don’t contain it. You react. And everything around you pays the price for that.” 

Amelia’s chest heaved. “You talkin’ like I chose this.”

“No,” Virelle said. “I’m talking like you refused to learn it.” 

Amelia’s hands curled into fists. “Learn from who?” She demanded. “My grandmother died before she could tell me everything. My mama ain’t never been there. I been tryin’ to figure this out on my own—”

“And in the process,” Virelle cut in, “you attached yourself to the first place that felt like safety.” 

Amelia went still. 

“You embedded yourself in a house already rooted in ancestral work,” Virelle continued. “A woman who practices. A man bound to her. Another drawn to power and pleasure. You placed yourself at the center of something already alive.” 

Amelia shook her head slowly. “Stop. Annie was the one person I could feel safe with. I didn’t do that on purpose. I didn’t charm them on purpose.” 

“No,” Virelle said. “But you did it anyway.” Her eyes flicked briefly, toward Amelia’s chest. “You made sweetening work.” 

Amelia’s breath caught. 

“I…” she hesitated. “It wasn’t for them. I made it for myself. To soften things. To keep peace—”

“And instead,” Virelle said, “you amplified what you already are.” 

The realization crept in slow and sick. 

“You think that jar worked on its own?” Virelle went on. “You think it didn’t respond to you? Your blood? Your nature?” 

Amelia’s voice dropped. “I didn’t mean to trap nobody.” 

“You didn’t have to mean it.” Virelle’s gaze sharpened like daggers. “You’re a conduit. Not just for desire. For attachment. Obsession. Longing. That jar didn’t create those feelings…it fed them. And you stood at the center of it while it did.” 

Images flickered behind Amelia’s eyes. 

Annie’s hands on her hips and her lips and tongue on her pussy. 

Smoke’s stare and obsession with her smell, his nose pressed into her bloomers. 

Stack’s voice telling her he loved her the look in his eyes when he mounted her and fucked her in the backseat of his car. 

Her stomach turned. 

“I didn’t force them,” she whispered. 

“No. But you made it easier for them not to resist.”

Amelia’s shoulders caved in, her hands covering her face as she cried openly now. The kind of crying that came from being stripped down to truth you didn’t want to face. 

“I—I just–just wanted somewhere to–to belong,” Amelia choked. “That’s all I wanted.” 

Virelle watched her. Unmoved. 

“That doesn’t make you harmless.” 

Amelia dropped her hands, eyes blazing through tears. “Then what do you want from me?!” 

Virelle paused, then…

“I’m here because you’ve become a problem.” 

“A problem,” Amelia repeated, hollow. 

“Yes.” 

“For who?” 

“For everything around you.” 

Amelia laughed once. Bitter. Broken. “So what, you here to kill me then?” 

Virelle’s gaze lingered. She didn’t answer right away. 

“If that were the case,” she said finally, “you wouldn’t still be standing.” 

Amelia wiped at her face, breathing uneven. “Then why reveal yourself now?” 

Virelle looked past her for a moment. Into the trees. Listening to something Amelia couldn’t hear. 

“Because something else has.” Virelle said. 

Amelia followed her gaze instinctively. 

“Remmick,” Virelle added. “He felt you.” 

A chill crept through Amelia’s spine. 

“And he won’t stop. Virelle said. “Not now that he knows what you are.” 

Amelia swallowed hard. “Then teach me.” 

It came out raw. Desperate. 

“Teach me how to control it. How to stop this from happenin’ again. I can’t keep—” her voice broke, “—I can’t keep hurtin’ people.” 

For the first time, Virelle’s expression changed. She didn’t appear as hard, although that was still simmering. She was more focused. 

“You don’t get control because you ask for it,” Virelle said. “You get it when you stop pretending you’re not capable of destruction.” 

Amelia’s chest tightened. “I know what I did.” She said quietly. 

“Knowing isn’t enough.” 

The silence between them was thick and waiting. Amelia lifted her chin, even with tears still on her face. 

“Then don’t stand there talkin’ down to me like I’m some mistake,” she said. “Either help me…or leave me alone.” 

Virelle studied her. Long enough that the forest seemed to hold still around them. 

Then, a distant sound cut through. Another growl.

Remmick. 

Closer than before. 

Virelle’s eyes sharpened. “He found the trail.” 

There was no more time to argue. 

He had her scent now. 

Amelia felt it before she heard it again. Her chest tightened, her breath turning shallow as that same wrongness crept back over her skin. Her light flickered in response, weak but restless, like it was trying to rise and didn’t have the strength. 

“He’s comin’,” Amelia whispered. 

“I know,” Virelle said. 

No panic. No urgency in her tone. 

Amelia turned in place, scanning the dark between the trees like she might see him any second. “We gotta go!!” 

“We are going,” Virelle replied, stepping forward. “But I’m not dragging you blind through these woods again. You’ll leave a trail he can follow in his sleep.” 

Another crack split the distance. 

Closer. 

Amelia panicked. “Then what do we do?!” 

Virelle turned and looked fully at her now. 

“Where can you go,” she asked, “where your scent is already known…where your presence won’t raise suspicion…where you can hide without feelin’ like you’re hidin’?” 

Amelia’s mind scrambled. Images flickered too fast to hold—Annie’s—no…no. She’s not welcome there—Club Juke—how would she get inside?

Then…

Pearline. 

A small house. Quiet. Tucked away. A place that didn’t ask too many questions. 

“She got a place,” Amelia said quickly, voice shaking. “Pearline. She lives on the edge of town, near the low fields. Keeps to herself. Ain’t nobody gon’ be lookin’ for me there.” 

Virelle held her gaze for a moment. Measuring. 

“Think carefully,” she said. “You lead me somewhere unsafe, I will not stay to clean it up.”

“I ain’t lyin’,” Amelia snapped, fear sharpening her tone. “She’s safe. She don’t know nothin’ about this. She just…she minds her business.”

Another sound tore through the trees, accompanied by a wet inhale. A hiss.

Remmick was enjoying this. 

Virelle reached for Amelia. Her hand closed around Amelia’s wrist firm and grounding. 

“Picture it.” She said. 

Amelia’s breath stuttered. “What?” 

“The house. The road. The land around it. Don’t think—see it.” 

Amelia squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the image to the front of her mind. The shape of Pearline’s porch. The lean of the roof. The narrow dirt path leading up to it. The way the land dipped slightly before the yard opened up. 

“I got it.” Amelia said. 

“Good.” 

The air seemed to tighten. It felt like her body was being pulled away. Amelia barley had time to grasp before everything changed. 

The ground vanished. The trees folded inward. Sound dropped out of the world. For a split second, there was nothing but a hollow silence and the echo of her own pulse. 

And then, they were standing somewhere else. Amelia staggered forward, catching herself on the rough edge of a wooden post. Her breath came back in a rush. The smell of dry grass and old wood burned her nose. 

Pearline’s place.

It sat peaceful beneath the night sky, tucked back from the road like it had learned not to draw attention to itself. The house was small, one story, its paint long since worn down to soft gray wood. The porch sagged slightly at one corner, but the steps were swept clean. A rocking chair rested near the door, its wood polished from years of use. A lantern hung from a hood casting a warm circle of light across the boards. Beyond the house, the land stretched out flat and open, low fields kissed by the last of the evening air. The grass whispered softly with each passing breeze. 

Amelia’s chest rose and fell as she took it in, still trying to catch up to where she was. 

“We here,” she said, almost In disbelief. 

Virelle released Amelia’s wrist. Her gaze swept the property once with sharp and efficient eyes. The house. The land. The edge of the dark. 

Evaluating. 

“This will do.” She said.

Virelle’s attention shifted back toward the trees, listening. Amelia followed her gaze, her stomach tightening again. 

“You think he—”

“He will come.” Virelle said. “Just not yet.” 

Amelia swallowed hard, wrapping her arms around herself. The adrenaline was fading, leaving her cold. Shaken. 

“What do we do?” Amelia asked. 

Virelle finally looked at her again. For the first time since she appeared, there was something else in her expression. 

Focus.

“We make sure,” she said, “that when he does…you’re not the same thing he chased into those woods.” 

Moonlight filtered through the thin curtains of Pearline’s bedroom that was heavy with the scent of sweat and the river’s distant humidity. Sammie Moore had been there since dawn, slipped in after Stack dropped him off. Her husband was still gone, a letter came in saying his trip would be extended for at least another week. A full day tangled in sheets and each other, the world outside forgotten. Sammie couldn’t get enough of Pearline, especially not of her pussy—insatiable, drawn to it like a moth to flame. Loving the raw, musky taste that built through the hours, her scent deepening in the same drawers she’d worn since that morning. 

Pearline lay back on the bed, her deep brown skin sheened with sweat, legs parted wide as she watched Sammie with those expressive eyes, a mix of command and surrender in her gaze. She was still in her lilac-colored robe, hiked up around her waist, the cotton drawers tugged aside just enough. She was in no rush to change; she let the day’s wear cling to her, knowing it drove him wild. 

“Come here, boy,” Pearline said with a sultry tone, voice floating like she was singing to him. 

She patted the mattress between her thighs. Her fingers trailed down her belly, parting the damp fabric, revealing dark curls matted with her arousal, her pussy lips swollen and slick from his earlier attentions. 

Sammie crawled forward on his knees, his lean body buzzing with lust, eyes locked on her like she was salvation and sin wrapped in one. At twenty, he was all eagerness and learning, the Preacher’s son unraveling thread by thread. Guilt flickered in his chest—what would Pop say?—but it drowned under the pull of her, the way she opened for him, trusted him with this scared mess from her honey pot. Sammie settled between her knees, hands gripping her thighs, spreading them wider as he leaned in, the bridge of his nose brushing the damp crotch of her drawers first, inhaling deep. That taste…that smell—earthy, tangy, built up from her sitting through the Delta heat—it hit him hard, his dick twitching in his trousers, hard like locomotive steel. 

Sammie hooked his fingers into the waistband, pulling the drawers down her legs slow, letting them bunch at her ankles before tossing them aside. Pearline’s pussy was right there, exposed, glistening folds parted slightly, clit peeking out swollen and begging. Sammie dove in without a word, mouth latching into her, tongue flat and broad as he licked from her creamy entrance up to her clit in one long, hungry stroke. She tasted like everything he craved—salty-sweet, her juices coating his tongue, the day’s essence making it richer, more forbidden. He imagined what she must taste like after working the fields. Or after a performance at Messenger’s. 

Pearline’s hand found his hair, nails tugging on coarse hair, guiding him, “Right there,” she instructed, voice husky, hips lifting to press her pussy against his face. “Stay on that spot…my clit, baby. Don’t wander.” 

Sammie obeyed, lips sealing around the nub, sucking gently like she was a pair of lips he was kissing tender. His tongue circled, then he flicked the tip against her clit before flattening to lap in lazy swipes. Pearline moaned softly, thighs trembling around his ears, the sound validating him, making his chest swell with pride even as attachment knotted deeper. 

“Go slow with the tongue,” Pearline breathed, her free hand cupping her breast, pinching the nipple through the fabric of her ribe as she watched him work. “Like you savorin’ it. Yeah…just like that.” 

Sammie was a good learner, always had been—earnest, attentive, hanging on her every word like his father’s sermons. He eased his pace, tongue dragging languid across her clit, then dipping lower to thrust inside her pussy, fucking her with it shallow before returning to suckle the sensitive peak. Her arousal flooded his mouth, dripping down his chin, and he groaned against her, the vibration making her buck. 

Pearline was wetter now, pussy clenching around nothing as he ate her out, his hands kneading her ass, pulling her closer.

“Suck on it soft,” she directed, voice edging toward a gasp, “like kissing lips…gentle, but firm. Don’t stop.” 

Sammie followed, mouth working with precision, alternating sucks and slow licks, his nose buried in her coils, breathing her in. The secrecy of it all added urgency, her husband’s shadow making every lap feel stolen; temporary. For her, this was breathing, being touched with intention, wanted as a woman alive. For him, it was manhood, unfolding, losing pieces of innocence to her taste, her instructions, willingly stepping into the danger. 

Pearline’s breaths came quicker, her hips rolling against his face. 

“Deeper now…put that tongue back inside, then back up.” 

Sammie complied, plunging his tongue into her hole, tasting the depths, lapping at her walls before sliding up to circle her clit again. Pearline was close, body tensing, and he doubled down, sucking harder on the command in her eyes, fingers slipping to part her folds wider for better access. Her climax hit sudden—pussy pulsing, juices gushing as she cried out. Her thighs clamped his head, riding his mouth through the waves. 

Sammie didn’t pull away, he licked her clean and savored the aftershocks. When she finally relaxed, hand stroking his cheek, she looked down at him with those beautiful eyes full of release and something deeper. 

“Good boy,” she whispered, pulling him up for a kiss, tasting herself on his lips. 

Sammie eased up from between Pearline’s thighs, his lips shiny with her  juices, chin slick. He knelt there, lean frame taunt with arousal so intense he felt like he would explode just from the taste of her on his tongue. He stared down at her, his eyes wide and earnest, Preacher Boy turned devourer. Pearline lay sprawled on the rumpled bed, her lilac satin robe fallen open like a spilled petal, the smooth fabric clinging to her curves where sweat beaded on her deep brown skin. She’s dabbed on jasmine oil that morning, the sweet, heady floral scent blooming warm from her neck and wrists now mingling with the musk of her arousal. 

Her wild curls fanned out on the pillow, dark and untamed, framing her face like a halo of midnight. Her eyes are glossy from her climax that still rippled through her, half-lidded and sated. She gazed up at Sammie with a lazy smile, chest rising steady, one hand idly tracing the edge of her robe where it gaped over her breast. 

Sammie wasn’t done. Not by a long shot. That taste lingered on his tongue, tangy and addictive, pulling him back like a river current. He needed more of her pussy, more of that forbidden feast that Stack had talked vulgar about during drives to Club Juke, lessons passed like contraband. 

“Stack…he told me ‘bout findin’ that button down there.” Sammie said, voice rough, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand but not quite breaking the stare. “Said to savor it like an ice cream cone. Slow licks, make it last. And keep givin’ the woman what she deserves. A good lickin’, and a happy endin.’” 

Pearline let out a soft giggle, the sound bubbling up warm and surprised, her full lips curving as she propped on her elbows. 

“Oh, that cousin of yours…Stack got a way wit’ words. Teachin’ you right, ain’t he?” 

Her voice carried that southern lilt, smooth as molasses, eyes sparkling with amusement and the afterglow of a woman wielding pussy power. Validation that made her feel seen, wanted beyond the drudgery of her days. 

Before she could say more, Sammie moved quick, surprising her with that surge. His hands gripped her knees, pinning them up to her chest, folding her open wide. Pearline’s, hairy pussy was exposed in full, lips pulled apart, clit peeking like a ripe berry, hole leaking. She gasped, a mix of shock and delight, her body surrendering under his touch. 

“Sammie—”

He was diving back in, face burying between her thighs, but not with frantic laps, no, he started with just kisses—lips pressing tender to her wet curls that shielded her outer lips, then inner, like he was greeting a lover’s mouth. Peck after peck. Pearline moaned, almost as if she was serenading him. Her hands flew to his head, fingers tangled in his thick hair. 

“Ooh, Sammie…mmm, baby…”

Each kiss sent sparks up her spine, her hips twitching despite the pinned position. Sammie kissed directly over her entrance next, lips sealing, tasting the fresh trickle of her arousal without a tongue in sight, just the pressure of his lips.

“Your cousin taught you well,” Pearline breathed, voice hitching as his lips brushed her clit in a feather-light kiss, making her arch. “You may be a young man, fresh as spring rain, but lawd, you sure know how to use them lips. Pleasin’ a woman like me…don’t stop, baby. Keep kissin’ it just like that.”

Pearline’s moans grew deeper, drawn-out sighs and low hums with vocal slides like she was making love with her mouth to a microphone. She called his name in that husky drawl—“Sammie, oh Sammie”—legs trembling against his hold. 

He kept at it, kissing every inch, devoted, drawing out her whimpers until her body quivered again, on the brink. His lips mapped her pussy with a steady overflow of kisses that grew firmer, more insistent, each one pressing deeper. Her outer lips, that rich, deep mahogany hue blending into the warm brown of her thighs, began to swell under the attention, plumping pull and heavy. Her inner lips peeked out more like wings, flushed a deeper coral, slick and parting just enough to reveal the tender pinkish core beneath, all of it framed by the coarse, dark curls at the top that were matted now with her growing wetness. With those kisses alone, Pearline started leaking—clear strands of her arousal seeping from her entrance, coating his lips and chin. 

Her clit throbbed into view, swelling to a firm pearl, hooded and begging without words as it pulsed under his gentle presses. Pearline’s breath came quicker, her wide eyes fluttering, that sated glow from before reigniting into something fiercer. 

“Mmm, that’s it, baby…keep kissin’ me there,” she whispered, guiding him like a patient teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. “Right on them lips…feel how I’m openin’ for you? Lawd, your mouth’s got me all stirred up.” 

Sammie patted his lips wider, drawing her inner lips and clit into his mouth, slick petals yielding to the pull, making her hips jerk once. Pearline gasped sharp, a whimper threading through it, her hand sliding from his curls to hook firm on the back of his neck, nails digging just enough to urge him on.

“Suck it like that, Sammie—oh, honey, yes. Get that clit, pull ‘em in your mouth. Ain’t nobody ever…mmmph.” Her words broke into a moan, low and rolling like thunder over the fields. 

His energy poured out relentless, that Preacher Boy devotion twisted into something raw and worshipful—eyes closed tight, shoulders hunched as he worked her pussy with single-minded fire, like he was atoning for every forbidden thought in one endless act. No hesitation, just pure, astounding need to draw every sound from her, to make her body sing under his touch. Pearline’s instructions kept coming, husky and fragmented between gasps. 

“Suck that wet part, make it pop. Yeah, kiss like…oh, lawd, you doin’ it right.” 

Pearline’s levitated her hips then, lifting clean off the bed, her knees still pinned but her core thrusted up, shoving her pussy hard into his face—feeding him every swollen, creamy, gushy inch, grinding against his sucking mouth with a sensual Dan e born of pure want. 

Sammie met her halfway, his large hands sliding under to cup her ass, firm cheeks filling his palms, the skin there smooth and sweat-slick. He squeezed, pulled her closer, pushing more pussy onto his lips, burying his face deeper until his nose brushed her curls. Sammie zeroed in, tongue joining the suck, lapping flat and broad over her clit before sealing his lips around it, sucking steady while his tongue swirled the tip. Then down to her inner lips, his tongue flicking between the petals, flattening at her entrance, lips puckering to suck whatever creamy goodness resided on her slick walls. The wet sound of his mouth was ridiculous, mingling with the distant call of a mockingbird outside. 

Pearline twitched hard, her body a live wire, thighs quivering against his hold, belly tightening as waves built fierce. Moans spilled free, turning to whimpers that pitched higher, gasps ripping from her throat with every suck on her clit. 

“Sammie…oh, baby, it feels so good—don’t you stop, keep suckin’ that…mmm, right there.” 

Her hips bucked wilder, shoving pussy into him, the pressure of his hands on her ass only fueling the grind, jasmine-scented sweat beading fresh on her skin, robe twisted forgotten beneath her. The build was too much, too fast—her words tangled, unable to form the warning, just choked.

“I-OH!!!” 

It crashed over her. Her climax hit like a Delta Storm, pussy cat clenching and flooding his mouth with a fresh gush, clit pulsing under his relentless sucks and licks. Pearline arched rigid, a long, keening moan tearing out—“PREACHER BOY!!”—body shaking as spasms rippled through her core, whole pussy contracting against his tongue. Sammie didn’t pull back right away, eating her through it all, sucking softer, licking that clit I’m slow circles to draw out every aftershock, swallowing her release with that same devoted hunger, hands kneading her ass to hold her in place. Pearline collapsed back, spent and trembling. 

Sammie eased off her then, his lips trailing wet kisses down the inside of her thighs, those smooth, deep brown curves quivering from the aftershocks. He peppered them gentle, savoring the salty tang of her skin mixed with the perfume oil that clung to her like summer vine, working his way lower until her legs relaxed fully, splaying open on the rumpled sheets. Pearline floated in that orgasmic haze, chest rising and falling in lazy waves, her wild curls fanned out like a dark halo, eyes half-lidded with a bliss that softened her whole frame. She was glowing and loose. 

Sammie rolled over onto his back, laying flat beside her, a content smile curving on his moist lips—wide and boyish, cheekbones prominent, the sheen of her pussy juice and cum smeared across his chin and mouth, glistening like dew on his skin. Pearline turned her head, gaze drifting down, and there it was: his dick straining hard against the front of his trousers, the fabric tented thick. A dark spot bloomed where pre-cum had leaked through. Pearline hadn’t touched it yet, hadn’t even glanced during their frenzy, but now it throbbed obvious, begging for attention. 

Pearline pushed up on one elbow, her satin robe slipping further off her shoulder, and reached over, placing her palm flat against that rigid length. She stroked slow at first, graceful fingers tracing the outline through the rough wool, feeling the heat pulse under her touch, the way it jumped eager against her hand. Sammie looked up at her, those expressive eyes wide with a mix of awe and hesitation

His voice came out rough and tender. “You ain’t gotta do nothin’ you don’t want, Pearline. I can keep eatin’ your pussy all night if that’s what you need. I’d be satisfied with that—more than.” 

Pearline laughed soft, a warm throaty sound that rolled like river mist, her hand keeping that steady stroke on his bulge, squeezing just enough to make him hiss. 

“Well, what if u wanna know what Preacher Boy Sammie got tucked away in his pants? Been wonderin’ since you walked in here with that smile.”

Sammie swallowed hard, glancing down at her fingers working him, then back up to her face. “You sure? I mean…” 

“I’m sure, baby,” Pearline purred, leaning closer, her seductive eyes locking on his with that confidence she carried like she was captivating an audience. “I want to. And you deserve it for bein’ such a good guest…eatin’ my pussy like no man ever has, drawin’ it outta me ‘til I couldn’t see straight.” 

Sammie tilted his head, curiosity flickering through the haze. “Your husband never ate you up like that?”

Pearline scoffed, a sharp little sound, her strokes turning firmer, thumb circling the tip through the cloth where it wept for her. “No, honey. I married a man that can’t keep it up half the time and sure as hell can’t please a woman like myself. Leaves me high and dry, every night the same old nothin’.” She massaged his hardened dick then, palm pressing full along the length, feeling it throb thick and hot. She worked from base to head in unhurried pulls. “I wanna show you why they used to call me Pretty Mouth Pearline,” she added, voice dropping low and teasing, that southern lilt wrapped around the words like a bawdy blues tune. 

Sammie’s breath caught, but he nodded, stunned silent as she sat up fully, her free hand moving to his belt buckle. She worked it open, with practiced ease, the metal clinking, then she tugged it free, looping it aside. Her fingers dipped to the button next, popping it with a flick, zipper rasping down, each tooth parting. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of his trousers and underwear both, peeling them down his lean hips, the fabric catching brief on his stiff dick, skin a warm brown flushed darker at the head, semi-thick shaft curved downward, the tip slick with pre-cum beading clear and ready. So much pre cum. 

Pearline let her eyes roam it appreciative, her hand wrapping around the base, fingertips meeting, stroking once from root to crown, drawing a low groan from him. Then, she leaned in, cupping his jaw with her other hand, and kissed him deep, lips pressing firm against his, tongue slipping past to taste herself on him, and that tangy mess of her release smeared between them. Sammie froze for a beat, stunned that she’d kiss him like this with his pecker in her hand, messy and unashamed, her flavor sharp on his tongue as she licked into his mouth. 

Sammie lay there rigid, his gaze locked on Pearline’s hand wrapped around his pecker, those slender fingers gliding with a twist of her wrist like she was churning butter. Speechless didn’t cover it, he cousins form a single word, throat tight as a drum. Jedadiah had run a tight ship back home, no room for anything but scripture and chores, and he’d never even lingered too long with the choir girls after service. Now here he was, stretched out on her bed with her fist working him steady, the heat of her palm sending parks straight up his spine. Sammie flicked his eyes from her face—those knowing eyes watching him close—to the sight of his dick, twitching in her grip, leaking so much pre-cum it stunned him. 

Pearline’s thumb brushed over the slick tip each time she reached the crown. She leaned in without a word, her tongue flicking out to lap away the bead of pre-cum gathered there, tasting him clean in one slow drag. Sammie’s whole body jerked, a choked sound catching in his chest as he fought hard not to spill right then, muscles locking tight while pleasure roared up from his balls. The kiss from before still lingered on his lips, but this new touch had him shaking, every nerve lit up under her strokes. 

Pearline eased her grip just enough to catch his eye. “Can I suck you, Sammie?” 

His chest heaved, the answer bursting out desperate and shaky. “Yes…but I–I don’t wanna cum fast.” 

Pearline gave a small nod, calm as ever. “It’s alright if you do. Just relax.” 

She settled down between his legs while he watched, eyes wide with nerves. Her palms slid under his balls, cupping them firm to hold his dick straight as the floorboards under the bed. Then, her lips found him, pressing slow kisses all along the length, warm and unhurried. Sammie’s mouth fell open, fresh beat of slick welling up at the tip and trailing down as he leaked steady under her touch. 

Pearline didn’t waste another second. She opened her mouth wide and swept her tongue upward, licking him from the base to the crown in one long, slow stroke, just like she was tasting a sweet popsicle on a July afternoon. The warmth of her mouth was a shock to his system, and as she repeated the motion, the tip of his dick leaked a heavy bead of pre-cum that she licked clean with a hungry flick. 

She could feel him trembling, his balls tightening and pulling up close to his body as the pleasure spiked. Pearline paused for a heartbeat, looking up at him with those dark, knowing eyes, her voice a sultry drawl. 

“You like that, Sammie? Feel good, baby?” She let out a soft, teasing hum, her tongue swirling around the head of his pecker. “Preacher Boy love this tongue on his dick? Love how I’m tastin’ you?” 

Sammie’s head hit the mattress, his fingers digging into the sheets. He felt like he was floating and drowning all at once. 

“God…you ain’t real…” he gasped, his voice breaking. “Holy shit, Pearline…”

Pearline stopped for a moment, a playful, wicked smile touching her lips. She reached down, her fingers gently massaging his tight balls, rolling them between her palms while her tongue gave the underside of his shaft a sharp, wet lick. 

“Ain’t no God in here, baby.” She whispered, her breath hot against his skin. “Just you and me. Just this right here.” 

Before he could even process the words, Pearline lunged forward. She opened her throat and took him in, sliding her mouth over him in one fluid motion. She didn’t stop at the head; she pushed deeper and deeper, swallowing him whole until the base of his dick was pressed hard against her lips. 

Sammie let out a choked sound, his entire body stiffening. He was stuck, buried deep in the wet, right heat of her throat. The suction was intense, a vacuum that seemed to pull the very soul out of him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, just lay there pinned by her mouth, feeling the squeeze of her throat muscles gripping his pecker like a vice. He was completely at her mercy, wet, muffled sounds of her taking every inch of him filling the room. 

Pearline glides her lips off of him with agonizing slowness, the wet suction making a soft popping sound as she finally released him. She kept her eyes locked on his the entire time—dark, hooded, and brimming with a playful sort of power. 

Sammie was a complete wreck. He lay there panting, his chest having, his pecker throbbing and glistening with her spit. He felt stunned, his mind racing to comprehend how she had managed to take every single inch of him down her throat in one fluid motion without even gagging. You see, them Moore men are well endowed. Packing more meat than a butcher. Sammie always struggled with where to put it all, Stack cracking jokes about it. 

“See, that’s why all the Moore men walk slow. Safety reasons.” 

Sammie frowned. “That true?” 

Stack grinned. “That’s what I tell the tailor every time he send me a bill.” 

“How…how you do that?” Sammie rasped, his voice sounding thin and strained. He looked at her, genuine bewilderment in his eyes. “Pearline…I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that. You…you use one of Annie’s spells?” 

Pearline quirked a brow, a small, amused smile playing on her lips. She let out a low melodic giggle that vibrated in the room. “Annie’s spells?” She asked, her voice dripping with honeyed sarcasm. “You think Annie got spells that help a woman suck some wood?” 

Sammie’s mind flashed back to a few days prior. He remembered skipping rocks in the pond near Annie’s shack and overhead Stack talking in a low, gravelly tone to Amelia. He recalled Stack mentioning that Annie sold a special mix—some kind of root powder—that helped women provide their men with a “throat service” that would make a man forget his own name. 

“I heard Stack,” Sammie admitted, his voice earnest. “He was talkin’ to Amelia over at the shack. He said Annie sells a mix…somethin’ to make the throat open up, to make it feel different.” 

Pearline’s expression softened into something wicked. She reached up, her fingers grazing the head of his pecker, swirling the pre-cum around the tip. She looked up at him, her eyes flashing with a pride that was entirely carnal. 

“No, baby,” she whispered, “I don’t need no conjure to suck some dick. This here is all natural. Just a woman who knows exactly how to handle a man.” 

Before Sammie could utter another word, Pearline lunged. She didn’t tease him this time; she opened her mouth wide and drove forward, swallowing him whole once again. The sensation was instantaneous and overwhelming. He felt his shaft slide past her lips, past her tongue, and deep into the tight, wet heat of her throat. 

She took him all the way back, burying him deep until her face was pressed against his pubic bone. Sammie let out a muffled cry, his hips jerking upward instinctively. He was trapped again, pinned by the incredible suction of her throat, feeling the pulsing squeeze of her muscles propping him tight. Sammie lay there paralyzed by pleasure, realizing that no spell in the Delta could compare to the raw, natural hunger of Pearline’s mouth.

Pearline didn’t give him a second to recover. She locked her eyes onto his once more, a predatory glint in her gaze, and then she dove back down. This time, she kept her hands pressed flat against the mattress on either side of his hips, refusing to use them to guide him. She wanted him to feel the raw, unassisted power of her mouth. 

She clamped her lips tight around the head of his pecker and began to suck with a fierce pull. From the very top to base, Pearline was literally eating him, her cheeks hollowing out as she created a vacuum that felt like it was trying to pull the soul right out of his body. There was no hesitation, no tentative teasing, just passionate, hungry consumption. 

Sammie was completely shook. He lay there, his lean frame twitching against the sheets, his toes curling as the sheer force of her suction scent electric shocks straight to his spine. He wasn’t just moaning; he was letting out low, guttural groans that sounded more like prayers than pleas. 

He looked down at her, his expression one of total defeat. He stared at the top of her head, the wild curls of her hair bouncing with every deep, wet slide of her throat, and he felt a sense of awe that bordered on terror. To him, Pearline didn’t seem like a woman from the Delta anymore; she looked like some otherworldly creature, a siren who had lured him into a trap he had no desire to escape. 

He watched, mesmerized and breathless, as his dick disappeared completely into her mouth over and over again. The sight of his own shaft vanishing into the dark, wet tightness of her throat, combined with the wet, slapping of her lips hitting his pubic bone, broke whatever was left of his resolve. 

Pearline could feel him shaking, could hear the way his breath hitched in ragged gasps, and it only fueled her passion. She increased the pace, her tongue swirling around the rim of his head before she plunged back down, swallowing him whole with a greedy, desperate hunger. She was claiming him, marking him with every wet side, proving to the Preacher Boy that no sermon or scripture could ever compete with the visceral pleasure of her mouth. 

Sammie’s body couldn’t take the passivity anymore. The sheer, overwhelming sensation of her throat clamping down on him triggered something primal, something that drowned out the voice of his father and the echoes of the pulpit. He stopped shaking and started moving. He gripped the sheets tight with one hand and reached down with the other to steady himself as he began to thrust. He started slow, pushing his pecker deep into her wet mouth, grinding his hips against her face. He wasn’t just receiving pleasure now, he was taking it, driving himself into her mouth, causing the mattress to creak beneath them. 

Pearline’s eyes widened, looking up at him from under those wild curls. She hadn’t expected the Preacher Boy to find his rhythm so quickly, but she didn’t fight him, her tongue swirling around the head of his dick as he slid on and out. She let him set the pace, her cheeks sunkened as she sucked him past her uvula with every thrust, her eyes locked on his watching the transformation on his face. No.

Then, the sound came. A sound Pearline had never heard from the quiet, earnest boy who played his guitar in the shade. 

“Yeah…just like that,” Sammie groaned, his voice dropping an octave, turning raw and gravelly. “Suck it, Pearline. Eat it all…you like that, don’t you? You like havin’ the Preacher’s boy deep in your throat?”

Pearline froze for a split second, a jolt of pure electricity shooting through her. The contrast was intoxicating—A boy who looked like an angel talking like a blues singer. Hearing him claim her, hearing that filth spill from his lips in that thick Delta drawl, sent a surge of heat straight to her pussy. It fueled a hunger in her that was almost violent. 

Pearline didn’t just let him thrust, she started meeting him. She used her tongue to tease the underside of his pecker, sucking the head with a ferocious, intensity every time he bottomed out in her throat. She wanted him to feel exactly how much his words were affecting her. She wanted to drain him dry. 

“That’s it, baby,” Pearline thought, though she couldn’t speak with his dick filling her mouth. She started to moan around him, the vibrations from her hums Sammie could feel deep in his balls. She increased the suction, her lips tight and wet, swirling and pulling, determined to brings him back to the edge. 

Sammie was losing it. The combination of her expert mouth and the thrill of his own dirty talk had him seeing stars. He thrust harder, his hips snapping forward, breath coming out ragged. 

“I’m gon’…I’m gon’ fill you up, Pearline,” Sammie hissed, his voice shaking with the effort of not clomaxing instantly. “I’m gon’ cum right down your throat—you take all of me. Every drop.” 

The challenge in his voice was the final trigger. Pearline dove in with everything she had, her throat working like a pump, her tongue flicking frantically against his frenulum. She was eating him with a desperate, greedy passion, her eyes hungry and dazed, demanding that he give her everything he had. She wanted it right there in the back of her throat. 

Sammie’s body snapped like a dry branch in a storm. He felt the surge start deep in his gut, a violent, electric blaze that rushed downward, bypassing every thought of sin or salvation. He let out a strangled, guttural cry, his back arching off the mattress as the first wave of climax hit him with a force that nearly blinded him. 

Sammie didn’t just cum; he erupted. 

It was the hardest he had ever experienced—a visceral, pulsing explosion that made his hand-jobs feel like a distant, pale memory. The tightness and skill of Pearline’s mouth, the way she clamped down on him and refused to let go, turned the pleasure into something almost agonizingly sharp. He felt his pecker throb violently inside her, shooting thick, hot ropes of cum deep into the back of her throat. 

“Oh God…Pearline! Pearline!” He gasped, his voice breaking, his fingers digging into the sheets until the fabric groaned. 

Pearline didn’t flinch or pull back to let him breathe or give him a moment of reprieve. She sounded down, gripping the base of his length with her hand, squeezing tight while her mouth became a seal, sucking with a hungry slurp of her lips to draw every single drop out of him. She swallowed hard, her throat working in powerful gulps, taking his hot seed as it flooded her mouth. 

His entire frame trembled with the aftershocks. Sammie felt drained, hollowed out, and completely conquered. Every pulse of his pecker sent another spurt of cum into her, and Pearline met each one with a determined suction. Her eyes locked on his, watching him unravel. She wanted him to feel the full weight of his surrender; she wanted him to know that in this room, under her touch, the Preacher’s boy was nothing more than a man driven by raw, animal need. 

As the final tremors subsided, Sammie collapsed back into the pillows, his chest heaving, his breath coming in ragged sons of relief. He was floating, his mind a blank slate of white noise and pleasure. 

Pearline finally pulled away with a slow, wet pop. A thin string of saliva and cum connected her lip to the head of his glistening pecker. She didn’t wipe her mouth, instead she licked her lips, tasting the salt and heat of him, a triumphant, knowing smile playing on her face. 

Pearline looked down at him—spent, utterly defeated—and let out a soft, humming laugh that vibrated in the humid air of the room. 

“Now, tell me, Preacher Boy,” she licked her lips, her voice a sultry, velvet caress. “Does your daddy’s book got a chapter on a feeling like that?” 

Sammie’s hands shot up and caught Pearline by the waist before she could finish that teasing question. With a sudden yank, he dragged her down onto the mattress, rolling so he was straddling her hips, his spent pecker twitching back to life against the soft satin of her robe. 

“No,” he panted, voice still hoarse from the way she’d just wrung him dry, “the book don’t got a chapter for that feelin’.” He leaned in close, lips brushing her ear. “But if it did, I reckon it’d call it damnation…and I’d read it every night.” 

Pearline let out a bright, surprised laugh that shook her whole body beneath him. 

He kissed her hard, open-mouthed, tasting himself on her tongue as his hips rolled forward. His pecker, slick and semi-hard again, dragged along the warm seam of her pussy through thin fabric, grinding slow and heavy. Pearline moaned into his mouth, her thighs parting wider on instinct, and he pressed down firmer, letting her feel every inch of him sliding against her swollen lips. Sammie’s hands roamed under her robe, thumbs brushing her nipples, nudging his pecker insistently at her pussy lips. 

Then came a knock. 

Three firm raps against the front door. 

They both froze. Sammie’s mouth hovered over hers, breath ragged. His mind raced starved straight to Stack—maybe his cousin had come early to drag him back to Jedadiah or help him finalize things at Club Juke or whatever trouble the twins cooked up. Pearline’sceyes flocked toward the bedroom door, wide and suddenly alert. Pearline sat up quick, sliding out from under him. She tugged her robe tight around her body, knotting the belt with shaky fingers. A flicker of panic crossed her face, the last thing she needed was some nosy fucking neighbor checking in while her husband was gone. 

“Stay put,” she whispered, voice firm, “I ain’t finished with you yet, Preacher Boy.” 

She gave him one last heated look, then slipped out of the bedroom, leaving Sammie alone on the rumpled sheets, pecker hard and aching, heart hammering as he listened for voices at the door. 

Her feet padded across the worn hardwood as she made her way through the small house. 

Something about the knock sat wrong with her. 

By the time she reached the front door, concern had begun curling in her stomach. She unlocked it and pulled it open. 

The sight before her made her heart sink. 

“Lord have mercy!” 

Amelia stood on the porch. Her curls were tangled and damp. Dirt streaked the hem of her dress. Her cheeks were blotchy from crying, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed. She looked exhausted. Like she’d been running. Like she’d been running for a long time. 

“Amelia?” 

Pearline immediately stepped forward. 

“What happened, baby?” 

Amelia opened her mouth. Nothing came out. 

Pearline’s worry deepened. Then, she noticed the woman standing beside her. The stranger was unlike anyone she’d ever seen. 

Tall. 

Elegant. 

Still.

Her skin held a pale gold-brown hue that seemed untouched by the world around her. Long dark hair fell in heavy waves down her back, nearly reaching her waist, catching the moonlight in subtle ribbons of silver. Her features were striking enough to make a person stare twice—high cheekbones, straight nose, full mouth. 

But it was her eyes that unsettled Pearline. 

They were Ancient. Sharp and watchful. The eyes of somebody who spent a very long time studying the world and found little left capable of surprising her. She wore dark clothing fitted close to her fame—a long coat draped over narrow shoulders despite the warmth of the Mississippi night. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on her. As if she hadn’t traveled at all but simply appeared. 

Pearline felt the hairs on her arms rise. 

The woman said nothing. Simply watched. 

Waiting. 

Amelia finally found her voice. It came out small and broken. 

“P–Pearline…”

The sound alone was enough. 

Pearline’s exhaled. “Oh, honey.” 

Amelia lowered her head. Tears gathered again. 

Pearline reached out instinctively, touching her shoulder.

“What the hell happened?” 

Amelia swallowed, then looked over her shoulder toward the darkness beyond the porch, then back at Pearline.

“Can we come in?” 

Pearline didn’t hesitate. 

“Of course you can.” 

She stepped aside immediately. The screen door creaked open wider. 

Amelia entered first, and the strange woman followed after her, silent as a shadow. 

Pearline closed the door behind them. 

It started in a bayou. A bayou that extended wide beneath a pale afternoon sky, its dark water and cypress trunks rose from the earth like old sentinels. Spanish moss hung from the branches overhead, stirring lazily whenever a breeze managed to find its way through the trees. Dragonflies skimmed in the distance, frogs croaked from the reeds, and birds called to one another from hidden perches deep within the swamp. 

Six-year-old Elias Moore sat alone on a flat stone near the water’s edge, his bare feet dusty from a day spent wandering farther than his father would have approved of. His overalls were stained at the knees. A thin stick rested on his hands as he scraped absent-minded patterns into the damp earth. Every few moments he glanced across the water, though he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. His thoughts had drifted elsewhere. 

Somewhere ahead, Elijah was running through the trees. Stack could hear him now and again. A laugh. A shout. The crack of a branch underfoot. His twin sounded carefree. Untouched by the ache that had settled inside Elias’ chest. 

Their mama had been gone a long time. 

He never got to hear her voice. Never got to hug her. Eat her cooking. Sit in her lap under the stars after a hard day in the fields. That frightened him more than he liked to admit. And yet, his daddy blamed him for her passing. Beat him so bad with his belt it left him raw on the ass for days. And Elijah would comfort him. Elias feared that the beatings would get worse. And that Elijah would get darker. 

Elias lowered his gaze to the muddy ground and swallowed against the lump forming in his throat. The loneliness came in waves. Sometimes it caught him by surprise. Sometimes it sat beside him all day. Today it had followed him all the way to the bayou.

A flash of movement across the water pulled his attention upward.

At first, he thought it was a bird. 

Then, he thought it might be sunlight slipping between the trees.

But when he blinked, he realized it was a woman. 

She stood beneath a cluster of cypress trees on the opposite bank. For a moment, Elias simply stared. He couldn’t have explained why. Nothing about her seemed frightening. Strange, maybe. Unexpected. Yet there was something about her presence that rooted him to the spot. 

The woman moved through the trees with an easy grace. Her long, dark hair flowed down her back, catching bits of sunlight where it touched her. Her skin carried a warm, golden-brown glow that reminded him of river stones after a summer rain. She seemed completely at ease, as though the bayou belonged to her. 

Elias frowned slightly. 

He hadn’t heard anyone approach. 

Hadn’t heard a horse.

One moment she wasn’t there. The next she was.

The woman turned slowly, and her eyes found him immediately. 

A smile spread across her face. 

The sadness in Elias’ chest eased without warning.

It wasn’t magic. At least, not in any way he understood. It simply felt like stepping into sunlight after standing in the shade too long. Warmth spread through him. The hurt he’d been carrying all afternoon loosened its grip. 

She raised one hand and waved. 

Elias looked behind himself instinctively, half expecting someone else to be there. 

There wasn’t. 

The wave was for him.

Tentatively, he waved back. 

The woman’s smile widened. 

She began moving closer to the water. Calm. Every step seemed measured, as though she already knew exactly where she was going. The closer she came, the more clearly Elias could see her face. 

She was beautiful.

Not in the way church ladies described beauty. 

Not in the way grown folks talked about pretty women. 

She looked like something from an old story. Like she’d stepped out of one of the folktales whispered on front porches after dark. 

When she reached the water’s edge, she stopped and looked at him for a long moment. There was kindness in her eyes. Kindness and something else he couldn’t name. 

Then, she spoke. 

“Everything’s gon’ be alright, baby boy.” 

Her voice carried across the water with surprising ease.

Elias felt those words settle somewhere deep inside him.

He didn’t know why he believed her.

He just did. 

The woman continued smiling, and for the first time, in a very long time, the ache of losing his mother didn’t feel quite so heavy. 

He found himself smiling back. 

The woman studied him quietly. There was affection in her gaze now. Pride, even. As though she were looking at someone she had known for years instead of a little boy she’d never met before. 

Stack tilted his head. “How you know?” 

The question slipped out before he could stop it.

The woman laughed softly. The sound reminded him of water moving over smooth stones. 

“Know what, baby?” 

“That everythin’ gon’ be alright.” 

Her smile softened.

“Because it will.” 

Stack considered that answer carefully and decided it wasn’t much of an answer at all. He opened his mouth to ask another question, but the woman was already looking beyond him, toward something far away. 

Toward something he couldn’t see.

When her gaze returned to him, there was a sadness in it now. A tenderness that made his young heart ache for reasons he couldn’t understand. 

For a moment, he thought she might say something else. 

Thought she might tell him who she was. 

Instead, she simply smiled once more. 

Then, the sunlight shifted across the water. 

A breeze stirred the moss overhead. 

And when Elias blinked, the woman was gone.

For years, that was how Stack remembered it. 

The woman appeared. She smiled. She told him everything would be alright. 

Then, she vanished. 

The memory had lived inside him untouched for so long that he questioned it. Never examined it too closely. It remained preserved exactly as he’d experienced it, tucked away in a quiet corner of his mind where grief and wonder shared the same space. Yet now, standing beside the bayou once more, something felt different. 

The water no longer moved. 

The dragonflies were gone. 

Even the breeze had disappeared. 

The world had become unnaturally still. 

Young Stack frowned.

The woman remained at the water’s edge. Except she wasn’t fading this time. She wasn’t leaving. 

Instead, she took a step forward. 

Then another. 

And another. 

The distance between them began shrinking. A strange feeling settled in Stack’s stomach. And it wasn’t fear, it was recognition. 

The closer she came, the more details emerged. The curve of her smile. The shape of her eyes. The softness of her cheeks. Features he should have recognized before but somehow never had. 

The woman stopped directly in front of him. Close enough that another face began to appear beneath it. Not replacing hers. Blending with it. Like two reflections meeting on the surface of water. Dark eyes. Long hair. A familiar smile. 

Amelia. 

The realization drifted through the dream slowly. 

The woman and Amelia. 

Amelia and the woman. 

Something connected them. Something important. Stack’s young brow furrowed in confusion. 

The woman lowered herself to one knee before him. The sadness in her eyes seemed deeper now. 

Older. 

Like she carried knowledge too heavy for a child to understand. 

“You got a good heart,” she told him softly. 

Stack shifted on his feet where he stood. He wasn’t sure what to do with that.

The woman smiled.

Then, she reached out and rested her hand against his cheek. 

Warm. Gentle. Real. 

The touch filled him with the same peace he’d felt all those years ago. 

Only now there was something else beneath it. 

Urgency. 

The feeling that she was trying to tell him something before time ran out. 

The golden glow around her brightened. The trees blurred at the edges. The water shimmered. Everything around them seemed to bend and stretch.

Stack opened his mouth. 

“Who are you?” 

The woman looked at him for a long moment. Then, she smiled. A sad smile. The kind grown folks wore when they already knew how a story ended. 

“You’ll know one day.” 

The answer frustrated him. 

Before he could ask another question, her hand squeezed his cheek gently.

Then she spoke again. This time her voice sounded far away. As though it was coming from years ahead instead of a bayou. 

“Take care of my girl.” 

Stack blinked. 

The words didn’t make sense. 

“My what?” 

The woman only smiled. 

The glow surrounding her intensified until it washed across the water, the trees, the sky itself. Everything became gold. Everything became light. 

And then—

Pain. 

A sharp ache exploded through his shoulder. 

The bayou shattered. 

The light vanished. 

Stack jerked awake with a gasp lodged in his throat. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. The dream clung to him stubbornly. He could still see the woman’s face. Still feel her hand against his cheek. Still hear those impossible words echoing inside his head. 

Take care of my girl. 

His chest rose and fell rapidly as he stared at the ceiling above him. A familiar scent lingered in the room. 

Lavender.

Rose water.

Amelia. 

Memory crashed into him all at once. 

The confrontation. The jars. Smoke shouting. Annie crying. Amelia glowing.

The force of her power slamming into him. 

Stack sucked in a breath and immediately regretted it. Pain shot through his ribs and shoulder, forcing him to grit his teeth. He pushed himself upright anyway, one hand pressed against his side as he looked around. 

Moonlight spilled through the curtains and stretched across the floorboards. 

Amelia’s room. 

Her dresser sat against the wall. A brush remained where she’d left it. One of her ribbons rested on the counter of the vanity. Her books were pilled in the corner. A dress hung from a peg near the door. 

Small pieces of her. 

Evidence that she’d been here. Evidence that she wasn’t now. 

The realization settled heavily in his chest. 

She was gone. The dream lingered. The woman’s voice lingered. And for the first time in twenty years, Stsck found himself wondering if that day by the bayou had ever been a memory at all. 

When Stack finally stepped out of Amelia’s room, the floorboards creaked beneath his weight as he made his way down the hallway, one hand braced against the wall whenever the ache in his ribs threatened to steal his breath. Every part of him felt sore. His shoulder throbbed. The side of his head pulsed steadily. Even his jaw ached from where he’d hit the floor. 

The smell reached him first. 

Coffee. 

Sage.

Burnt candle wax.

Home.

A warm glow spilled from the kitchen doorway ahead. Stack rounded the corner and found exactly what he’d expected. 

 Nobody had gone to bed.

Smoke sat at the table with his arms folded across his chest, a half-empty mug resting near his elbow. The hard set of his jaw told Stack he hadn’t moved much since Amelia ran. Annie stood near the counter sorting through bundles of herbs, carefully separating stems from leaves and placing them into small bowls. Broken pieces of glass sat piled nearby, gathered from the wreckage left behind in the shack. 

The moment Annie saw him, she abandoned what she was doing.

“There you are.” 

She crossed the room immediately. 

Before Stack could protest, her hands were already on him. Turning his face. Checking his eyes. Pressing careful fingers against his ribs.

Stack endured it without complaint. 

Annie clicked her tongue. “You hurt.” 

“I noticed.” 

“You lucky you ain’t crack nothin’.” 

Smoke let out a grunt. “Hard-headed bastard probably cracked the shelf instead.” 

Despite everything, the corner of Annie’s mouth twitched. 

Stack managed a weak snort.

Then, the moment passed quickly. Reality settled back over the space. 

Annie returned to the counter. Smoke stared into his coffee. Stack lowered himself carefully into a chair. 

Silence lingered. Heavy. Uncomfortable. 

Smoke finally broke it.

“You still gon’ defend her?” 

Stack looked up.

Smoke was already watching him.

Waiting. 

Stack rubbed a hand over his face. 

“I ain’t defendin’ what happened.” 

“Sound like it.” 

“It ain’t.” 

Smoke leaned back in his chair. “She damn near killed you.” 

The words hung there. Sharp. Unavoidable. 

Stack’s jaw tightened. “She ain’t mean it.” 

“That don’t change what happened.” 

“No.” 

“Didn’t change what happened to Nathaniel either.” 

Silence. 

Annie stopped sorting herbs. 

Stack looked down at the table. 

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Annie sighted softly.

“I keep thinkin’ ‘bout somethin’.” 

Smoke looked toward her. “So say it, woman.” 

Annie sat down across from them. Her hands folded together. “Everythin’ she done got one thing in common.” 

Smoke frowned. “What?” 

Annie’s gaze drifted toward the dark window above the wash basin. “She lose control.” 

Stack lifted his head. 

Annie continued. “She lost control with Nathaniel. Lost control tonight. Every story got the same end. Fear. Grief. Anger. Somethin’ pushes her too far and that light takes over. 

Smoke’s expression remained hard. “Still got people hurt.” 

“I know.” Annie’s voice softened. “I know.” 

The sadness there settled over the room. Because they all knew. Nobody had escaped this untouched.