Page 58 of Collateral Love
Because loving Kenya wasn’t about taking.
It was about waiting without entitlement.
I didn’t know then how long that wait would be.
I didn’t know how many bodies would fall.
How many years would pass?
How much blood, money, and silence it would cost.
But I knew the woman who would one day be my wife was already building the world she’d need to survive the worst version of me.
And I was already becoming the man she’d need when that world finally came under attack.
That was the beginning.
Not of romance but of collateral love.
I didn’t noticeI was slipping at first.
That was the part that bothered me.
I’d spent so much of my life managing load-bearing shit that fatigue just became another variable like distance, or risk, or temperature. Something you factored in and then ignored.
But that night, it caught up with me.
We were in the same third-floor study room in the engineering building. The one with the busted camera in the corner and the conveniently “malfunctioning” card reader I’d paid a quiet janitor a hundred dollars to overlook. We’d been there so much that our scent probably lived in the carpet by now—paper, ink, nicotine, and the faint tang of cologne and stress.
Maps and printouts were spread across the table. My handwriting threaded through Zayden’s notes, neat and precise even though my hands were starting to shake from too much caffeine and not enough sleep.
I was staring at a campus map focused on the west lot, overflow lot, and the delivery route, when his voice cut through the hum of the fluorescent lights.
“You've been lookin’ at that same block for five minutes, YaYa.”
I blinked.
“I’m recalculating,” I said automatically.
“Nah,” he said. “You're stuck.”
That made me look up.
Zayden sat across from me, chair leaned back just enough to piss off any professor who still believed they had authority on this campus. His eyes were on me, not the map. That was the part that made my skin prickle.
“I don’t get stuck,” I said.
“You do when you're tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
That lie tasted like burnt sugar on my tongue.
His mouth tugged at the corner, not quite a smile. “You lyin’ to you or me?”
I clicked my pen harder than necessary. “You wanna micromanage, or you wanna listen while I explain why this route doesn’t work anymore?”
He didn’t rise to the bait.
