“I’m gonna blow these candles out before you burn down the damn house.”

He jumps out of the bed and runs his foot through the salt, disrupting, destroying the circle. All four candles snuff out at once.

Dread starts as a knot in my chest and blooms over every limb.

“What the . . .?” He looks from the extinguished candles to my face and back again. “These trick candles don’t fool me so—”

“They’re not trick candles, Kenan,” I tell him solemnly. “I know you don’t believe me, but—”

“Of course, I don’t, Lotus.” He sighs. “Baby, what do you expect me to think when I wake up in the middle of the night surrounded by some candles and salt and you chanting? I . . . it’s too much. Tell me you know this isn’t real.”

We watch each other in mutual obstinacy, the silence an impasse hanging like a broken bridge between us. I won’t say it’s not real. I don’t know everything. I don’t always know what’s true, and I can’t always interpret what I sense, but I know there is more beyond the limits of the three dimensions we see—that the walls between one dimension and another aren’t as thick as we might believe. Beyond this life lies eternity, infinity, time that’s not measured by minutes, hours, days or years.

“I can’t lose you, too,” I finally whisper. My hands tremble around St. Expedite, the little statue I found at the bottom of MiMi’s chest. “If anything happened to you, I . . .”

The stiff lines of his shoulders, the inscrutable expression softens. One strong arm scoops me from the end of the bed and into his arms, into his lap. He rocks me like a baby and kisses my hair.

“Nothing’s gonna happen to me,” he says in what I’m sure is supposed to be a reassuring voice. “We fly out tomorrow. Let’s get some rest.”

I bury my face in his neck and swallow my tears, letting him think he’s comforting me, but long after he falls asleep, his heartbeat evening out under my ear, I lie awake. In this house, I learned to peel the film from my eyes—to discern beyond what’s right in front of me. I may not be able to see the threat, but the threat sees me. I show it my rabid heart, prowling in a fiery, salted circle, my teeth bared. Vigilant. A psalm on my lips, and the little saint who guards the grave clenched in my hand.

41

Kenan

Lotus and I are exiting the airport, headed for the car my assistant, Davis, arranged for us when the first reporter approaches.

“Kenan,” he says, the phone aimed at me to record, audio or video, I’m not sure. “How’d you feel about tonight’s episode?”

With the fast trip back from China, going down to Louisiana, and our idyll in the bayou, I’d forgotten the first episode of Baller Bae aired tonight.

Dammit.

“No comment,” I mutter, lowering my head and pulling Lotus closer.

“Lotus, is it true what Bridget said?” another tosses out. “About you and Chase Montclair?”

Lotus’s head jerks around in the direction of the question the reporter hurled at her. “What are they talking about?” she asks, looking up at me with wide, angry eyes.

“Ignore it, babe.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t give them anything.” I spot the car service ahead. “Banner’s blowing my phone up. I’ll call her in a second. Let’s get out of here.”

I settle Lotus in the back seat and hand our bags to the driver so I can escape the glare of any cameras as soon as possible. It’s not the chaos that followed the scandal, with a hundred cameras and questions catapulted at my head every time I stepped outside, but if we don’t get this shit under control now, it could be.

I call Banner back as soon as we pull off.

“B, what the hell is going on?”

“Where are you?” Banner asks with that forced calm I’ve learned to see through over the years.

“Just landed in New York, but heading back to Cali day after tomorrow.” I frown and lean forward. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, per se.”

“The hell, Banner. You don’t call me four times for some ‘per se’ shit, and reporters harassed me as soon as I stepped outside the airport doors. What’s going on?”

“You checked any TV, social media? That kind of thing?”

I stiffen. “No,” I say, dragging the word out. “Why?”

“I’m sending you a link. Don’t lose your temper. It’s nothing, but I wanted you prepared.” Banner hesitates. “Is Lotus with you?”

I told Banner about Lotus soon after we officially became “more than friends.” She represents me best when she knows what’s going on in my life and what’s important to me, so she definitely needed to know about my girl.

“Yeah, she’s here. They had questions for her, too.”

Lotus glances up at me, something that is concern, but not quite worry, in her expression. We’re both exhausted. Waking up in the middle of the night to some Angel Heart shit didn’t exactly make for a good night’s sleep. We haven’t discussed it further, thank God. Things have been relatively normal all day. Until all this not normal hit us.

“Watch the clip,” Banner says. “And let me know if you need anything.”

“Bye.” I hang up and grab the link from her text.

The preview of the video already has me gritting my teeth before I’ve even pressed play. It’s the Baller Bae logo and a still of Bridget at lunch with two other cast members in the sequence.

“I tried to make it work.” Bridget shakes her head, apparent sadness and regret on her face. “I know it wasn’t right, what I did, but Kenan abandoned me in the marriage. I was so BEEP lonely, and he didn’t care about anything but ball.”

A sheet of ice forms over my anger. I want to stop the video and not listen to the two minutes and forty-one seconds remaining, but I need to hear what else she has to say. Banner wouldn’t have asked about Lotus if she wasn’t involved in this nonsense somehow.

“And now he’s dating this child.” Bridget rolls her eyes, touching the hand of one castmate who murmurs something to commiserate. “She’s like fresh out of college. Not much older than our daughter. Can you believe that?”

“Girl, that’s how they do,” says a woman I recognize as the girlfriend of some guy in the league, but I can’t remember who. “He married you right out of college. You raised his baby, kept his house, stood by him while he built his career, and now he wants some fresh snatch.”

“That’s why we gotta revaginate, honey,” the other cast member says. “Keep it tight or they stray like that.”

Stray? As in I strayed? In what alternate reality has Bridget existed where I’m the villain in our story?

“And he was so mad that I had one little indiscretion,” Bridget says. “But I heard she’s going behind his back with this photographer she was BEEP before he found her.”

I press the screen to stop the clip. I can’t hear anymore right now. My temples literally throb with suppressed rage.

“Why’d you turn it off?” Lotus asks.

I glance down at her with a frown.

“Babe, she’s—”

“A bitch,” Lotus says sharply, staring at the screen in the dim light provided by the city lights beyond the car. “But she can’t hurt us.”

She tosses the phone onto the seat beside me and holds my face between her hands. “We know the truth.” Her eyes pierce mine. “You know I would never cheat on you with Chase or anyone.”

“Of course,” I answer immediately. “I trust you completely.”

“And we know that I’m not almost your daughter’s age.” She teases me, chuckling. “Though there’s eleven years between Simone and me, too. Should I call you Daddy?”

“You’re laughing?” I ask incredulously.

“What do you want me to do? Cry? Pout? Throw a tantrum? There will be people who watch that, feel sorry for her, believe her lies. We can’t control it. All we can do is live our lives, and refuse to let it come between us.”

I dip my head to kiss her, caressing her jaw with my thumb.

“Thank you for being so cool about this circus act.” I heave a frustrated sigh. “I’m not. I hate having my privacy invaded and having lies told about us, about you. Doesn’t she even think about how hard it will be on Simone? Dragging us back into the tabloids like this?”

The thought of my daughter being set back after the small steps forward she’s taken infuriates me. Despite her progress, I know she’s still emotionally fragile, and so many transitions, so much pressure and attention? It’s bound to wear on her.

“Fuck!” I expel the word harshly and slam my hand on the console between us. “If this hurts Simone . . . God, why can’t Bridget just . . .”

“It’ll be okay. Whatever comes, we’ll deal with it.”

“This is the last thing I want to be thinking about when I only have a day with you before I have to fly back.”

“Then don’t think about it.” Lotus leans in to kiss me, slipping her hand between my legs to squeeze my dick.

“Damn, babe,” I rasp into the kiss.

“I had to distract you somehow.” She laughs against my lips.

“Distraction or not, you woke the sleeping beast. Now you have to handle it when we get upstairs.”

I ask the driver to drop us off in the private car garage in case there are any more reporters lurking. I tip him, grab our bags, and half-limp as fast as I can with this hard-on to the elevator. As soon as the doors close, Lotus strains up on her toes to kiss my jaw and suck my earlobe. I kiss her so deeply we’re both out of breath by the time the doors open for my floor.

We drop the bags and Lotus wraps her arms around my neck, and her legs around my waist. I walk back to the bedroom, my hands full of her ass. She scatters kisses over my face.