Page 10 of Tangled Hearts
Knycole looked down at what he was claiming as his and just blinked.
It was her.
Her lips.
Her nose.
That little smirk she always hit him with when she was about to call him a liar.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was close.
“You act like you don’t like me half the time,” she mumbled through a half smile, “but be drawing me like I’m somebody worth looking at.”
Rock flicked ash off the blunt and reached for the juice bottle between them. “I ain’t gotta act like nothing. You already know what it is.”
Knycole studied the page one more time, then handed it back. “What is it, then?”
“You my girl,” he muttered. “I be fuckin’ up sometimes, but that don’t change it.”
Knycole exhaled slowly. “You don’t think that’s a problem?”
Rock leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Y’all always want the perfect version of a nigga before he even figure out who he is.”
“That ain’t true,” she frowned, “I just want to feel safe and respected.”
“I’m tryna be that for you.”
“Are you?” Knycole glared at him, challenging him to see shit from her perspective. She felt his love was true maybe it really wasn’t. She had such a skewed view of love thanks to her father. She’d fought Shakeisha too many times to count and yet he still found himself caught up in some shit with her.
He tapped the pencil against his knee, then closed the sketchbook and leaned back on the bench.
Rock wasn’t easy to deal with, but he wasn’t careless either. He carried things in silence, let them pile up until they spilled out in ways that didn’t always make sense to her. He had that mix of being young, reckless, and still thoughtful when he wanted to be. The type to fight his demons with the same breath he used to protect her from hers. He wasn’t the kind of boy who would say much about how he felt, but it was always sitting in him—in his drawings and the way he kept showing up, the way he wanted to be seen as more than what people counted him outfor. That was Rock. Always halfway between the man he swore he could be and the boy who didn’t know how to leave old habits behind.
“You smarter than me,” he finally shrugged. “Smarter than most people I know. You got your head on straight. I look at you, and I already know you gon’ be somebody.”
Knycole shifted in her seat. “Then why don’t you act like I’m somebody worth protecting?”
“I do.”
“Not with words, Rock. With choices. You think fighting for me means knocking a nigga out in front of the corner store, but you won’t stop doing shit that breaks me like fuckin’ the same bitch over and over.”
His chest rose, allowing her emotions to sink into him. Rock hated when Knycole got emotional. He already felt bad about what he did but seeing it in her face broke him too. “You think I don’t know that?”
Knycole pulled her jacket closed. “Sometimes I think you don’t care.”
“I do care. That’s the part that fucks me up.”
He reached over and pulled her hand into his lap. He didn’t squeeze or stroke or lace his fingers with hers. Just let it sit.
“I be thinking about what it’s gonna look when we older,” he muttered. “If I got my shit together, had a real crib. If you became a nurse or social worker or whatever. We’d come back here with our kids and tell ‘em this the bench I used to draw you on.”
Knycole laughed under her breath, her heart skipping beats listening to him see a future for them. “You be thinking like that?”
“All the time.” He looked down at their hands. “I just don’t know if I’ll ever make it to that version of myself. I don’t got no blueprint for that shit at all.”
“You don’t need a blueprint. Just need to want it bad enough.”
“I do. But wanting don’t be enough when the rent due and your stomach growling.”
