By 4 pm on any given weekday, The Link withers towards a ghost town. Save for the regular stragglers; the kids who stall the inevitable gloom of their own homes, that savour their relics of normalcy, and the odd few happy elsewhere but even happier here. Today's no differentâonly the real deterrent is the heft of London's cloudburst. Lightening that licks across the sky like a whip, thunder that claps like a bomb, rain that hails like fire.
Carrington is unmoved by its scenes beyond the windows of the Gymnasium, nor Kamale or Akeem or Nyx or Nathan, who volley basketballs every which way. Although they're yet to actually sink one through the hoop's unshaken net.
Eve finds solace in her folded arms, perhaps the only thing keeping her heart in its place as she recants this awful story. Beside her, Carrington all but tips from the edge of her seat at its cliffhanger. Days had passed since Eve let the event slip beneath troubled breaths, days of prodding and prying to no effect, until an odd ten minutes ago. When two seconds lull between them, her dropped jaw clamps shut and she twists up her face in disproval.
"Wait, that... That's it?"
Eve sighs. "There's nothing else to say. He dropped us off at Thistlebrook, he offered to take me home, I said I'd stay with Kamale, he..."
"He what?" Carrington perks, but Eve finds her optimism entirely misplaced. Still, her hand aches to trace the skin of her cheek, the phantom of his touch. Her stomach churns when she remembers how pathetically she'd splintered at the feeling, nigh on melting through his bruised fingers.
"He... It's nothing. Me and him are nothing, I just need to get over it already," Eve grimaces. "I wish I didn't miss him."
But she does miss him, and terribly so.
What better explanation for the chronic bellyache that chafes the walls of her abdomen at her every thought of him? Her crippling migraines at the memory of his face and her waken goosebumps at the echo of his voice. For all their time spent apart, why else had her only spell of relief been beside him, in the handful of minutes he'd spent taking her safely home? Her pain and her remedy. She doesn't know how much more of her unrequited feelings she can withstand, how much more she's willing to.
Carrington, narrowed eyes and tilted head, stares at her friend. She knows a thing or two about the guyâan odd ninety-nine percent of which boils down to hearsay, of courseâbut she knows enough about Eve to assume any apple of her eye would be shaped a lot less like Jahseh. She supposed hearsay mustn't be much to the real deal. Still, she's stilted by wonder whenever Eve goes on about him.
The hopeless romantic in her loves every bit of it.
"Hm," she hums. At this, Eve is thankful to break from her own thoughts to ogle at her mate.
"What?"
"I never really pegged him as your type," Carrington shrugs. The two sit, knees practically to chest, on one of the room's several balance benches, but Carrington unfolds her legs and instead crosses them at the ankle. She loosens against the wall, and Eve can't help the envy that ticks through her at the sight of it, because she'd been riddled uptight for weeksâyou couldn't get Eve to unwind if you took to her with a screwdriver.
"What do you mean?"
"You know..." Carrington again shrugs. "The whole good girl, bad boy combo. The church girl and the gang member. I ain't judging, though. I'm all for a good hood love story."
At that, a light somewhere within Eve flickers off.
Something somewhere, perhaps the impending doom that's circled her gut for such a while, or the looming qualms of the gentleman she's set her eyes on.
Perhaps not a gentleman at all.
"What? He's not a gang member, Carrington. He works at the garage."
"It's not like he's fully retiredâcan you even retire? I don't know, a part of me doesn't even believe he has. Like surely you can't just quit, you know what I mean?"
Eve blinks.
The No way is poised along her tongue, except she quickly notes that there is a way. It is possible. This variant of Jahseh she's come to feel for, come to know and perhaps love, may not have always been. And who is Jahseh without Eve? Before Eve? It's as possible he's a good samaritan as it is that he's the opposite. It's possible he saves kids from burning buildings and cats from the bellies of trees, it's possible he's her tender mechanic by day and a vigilante by nightâit's possible the man's Escobar himself. Only, Eve had never thought it possible he wouldn't tell her that.
"No. I don't, because he's not a retired anything. He's... You're telling me Jah was in a gang? My Jahseh?"
Carrington's chuckles unfold into guffaws, and she shifts herself better in Eve's direction. "You can't be serious, Eve. That man is tatted scalp to toe, you thought he's fully square?"
"He was in a gang?"
The truth of the matter nestles all about her, yet she feels the furthest thing from comforted. It'd been up in the air for months, surely. The more she ponders it, the better she realises. How many hints had she skirted by? How plainly is it on him? How skewed she must be not to see it as pointedly on him as the next man. She figures it's not anything you'd herald, yet at the same time can't think why he'd keep it from her. And every answer she comes to hurts her a little deeper than the last.
"It's not like he was on some corner shotting, he was like... Top of the food-chain. For years, Eve. Him and Snâ"
"He was in a gang."
"Oh, babe. I thought you knew, everyone knows that. He's as bad as it gets. Or he was, I guess. I don't know," Carrington lifts out of her slump a moment. "Well... At least you know why he's acting like he doesn't like you, too. Maybe he just didn't want you to know."
And perhaps that's the real lemon of it all.
As Eve sits there, across the way from the boy who'd stolen her bag, in a building she'd free-cycled to house London's misfits, in a town that'd taken more from her than she could ever put into words, she can only breathe through her disbelief, through this staggering sweep of irony. How surely she'd reckoned she knew the man, and yet all the while known there were quarters of himself she'd never get a good look at. All this time she'd spent fearful she didn't quite know him. Now Eve can seeâcut and dryâthat it's Jahseh that doesn't know her.
"I can't believe he didn't tell you."
"Neither can I."
No, he doesn't quite know her at all.
About damn time!
Next chapter I gotta bring out the big guns, dramatics on ten!
Eve is finally somewhat in the know! How do we think she's gonna move with this information?
Jahseh is essentially the hood celeb that we thought he was, but how deep in are you thinking? There's the tiniest hint here but it'll probably go over heads... LOL.
Eve's hurt that Jahseh didn't tell her, thoughts? Due to elaborate on this in the next chapter.
Let me know what you think!
See ya lata!