Page 68 of Collateral Love
We didn’t fall apartafter we fucked.
That surprised me.
People loved to talk about how sex ruined things. How once you crossed that line, you couldn’t go back to normal. They were partially right. We didn’t go back.
We just found a new normal.
Weeks slipped by after that night in his car after my knees pressed into his buttery leather seats and my knees cracked right down the middle, and life didn’t collapse. The campus still buzzed. Cherry University still pretended to be safe. Crestwood still breathed heavily and dangerously in the distance.
And Zayden and I kept moving.
We still met in study rooms and deli booths. We still mapped routes, counted profit margins, and adjusted drop times like grown folks doing group projects. He still argued percentages. I still pointed out blind spots.
But something in the air between us had shifted.
It wasn’t loud.
It wasn’t dramatic.
It was in the small shit.
Like the way he reached for me in public. It was in the way his hand hovered an inch from the small of my back in crowded hallways.
Or the way he stopped letting other girls call him “Zay” around me.
One night, some chick with big hair and acrylic nails walked up to him outside the union, giggling, touching his arm. I watched from across the walkway, pretending to scroll on my Sidekick.
“Zaaaaay,” she sang. “You don’t call nobody no more.”
He barely glanced at her.
“It’s King,” he corrected, eyes sliding over to me like it was nothing. “Or Zayden. Pick one.”
Her face pinched up like he’d snatched the flavor out of her gum. She walked off with an attitude.
He didn’t come over to explain, but he didn’t have to. I peeped the game.
We ate together more, too. Sometimes it was takeout in my tiny campus apartment, his long body taking up half my futonwhile we watched reruns ofOne on One. Sometimes it was him pulling up outside the engineering building at midnight with fries and a milkshake, because he knew the cookies-and-cream ones were my favorite.
We didn’t talk about ‘us’ because what’s understood doesn’t need to be explained.
We talked about runners, professors, and Jared’s appeal.
But every once in a while, he’d look at me like I was the love of his life, and he would make love to me until the sun came up.
Things were working.
The system held.
Which is exactly why it decided to crack.
The first sign was small.
Dre, one of our campus runners, a sophomore with a baby face and cocky grin, missed a check-in window. He was supposed to hit a handoff behind the language arts building at nine, then AIM me by 9:15 am with a simple “Done.”
9:20 am came and went.
The 9:30 am.
