Page 23 of Only a Gemini Will Do

King twisted his lips to the side as if he was going to war with himself on whether to associate with me or leave me standing in the short aisle alone. “I probably shouldn’t even be telling you this,” he mumbled before stepping closer to me. “But I think you should go home.”

My brows downturned. “What? Why?”

“He came back to the States.”

I froze momentarily before dropping back a step. “F-for what?” I probed in a shaky voice.

“For you. For y’all,” he responded, pointing to my belly.

My heart somersaulted inside my chest as my breath hitched.“Back to the States?” I mumbled.

I didn’t know how to feel about the news King had delivered to me. Never in a million years did I consider Kareem coming back to America and what that would mean for him or us. The authorities had called off the search and assumed he and Kadeem had died. Now he’d be back from the dead. I headed back to the car, where my friends were waiting for me. It was time to tell my girls there was a change of plans. I had to get home.

Chapter 6

Kareem

Growing up, they used to say that too much heat made niggas go crazy. I’d argue that love could make ’em crash out the same way, even harder, depending on the person. At least that’s what it was like in my case. I’d been sitting in the dark in Sawyer’s living room for the past three hours waiting for her to come home.

Just when I’d started to doze off, the door creaked open. Sawyer stepped inside and let out a hard sigh, signaling her exhaustion. Her overnight bag hit the floor with a thud as she flipped on the light and kicked off her Crocs, ready to hit the sheets. But then her eyes landed on me sitting on her couch like I belonged there, and she stopped cold.

Sawyer stood frozen in the doorway, her next breath caught up somewhere between her ribcage and her throat. She didn’t speak right away. Neither of us did. We just studied each other, trying to decode each other like a complex ass riddle. The air and the tension between us were thicker than Florida swamp water, but with more personal demons. A few seconds passed, and the only thing on her body that moved was her eyes, scanning me up and down like some high-tech security system.

“You broke into my apartment . . . again?” she asked stiffly.

I scoffed. “Shit, I was damn near invited in. I ain’t give you almost ten racks for you to go the cheap route to get your door fixed.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course, you’d barge in like you pay bills here when you don’t.”

I brushed off her comment and replied with a question instead. “Where you been?” I quizzed while slowly rising to my feet.

“It’s Thanksgiving, Kareem. I was in Tampa visiting my friends,” she answered matter-of-factly as she tramped inside with her arms folded and her cardigan wrapped around her belly. Classic Aquarius type shit—always trying to play it cool on the outside when we both knew better. “I should be the one asking you whatyou’redoing here.”

“You bring me back a plate?”

Her brows snapped together, signaling the emotional shit storm brewing underneath her skin. “Do I look like your mama?”

“No, but you look like my baby mama,” I stated, glancing at her belly.

Even wearing a cardigan, the round bump was hard to miss, like a mustache on a yellow bone. She unconsciously pulled her cardigan tighter, even though the cat had already been let out of the bag.

She scoffed and escaped past me into the kitchen. I followed a few steps behind, conscious enough to keep some distance between us. “You’re one cliff-hanging ass nigga, y’know that?” she snapped, whipping her neck in my direction.

“Who me?”

“Yeah, you. You and I both know you’renotsupposed to be here!”

“Since when has that ever stopped me?”

She smacked her lips. “Seriously, Kareem.”

“I know. But what the fuck did you expect me to do, Sawyer? You left Brazil and were just . . . gone.”

Sawyer huffed. “Because I needed space.”

“And I gave you that, shawty. But space doesn’t mean disappear.”

“To me it does.”