Page 16 of Kissed By the Trillest Thug 2

The words came out broken.

“I don’t understand,” she managed to get out again through tears.

I pushed away from the counter slowly. I moved cautiously to be careful of my arm. She didn’t look up when I walked around the island. I didn’t move when I stopped in front of her. And I didn’t say anything when I reached for her. I gently caught her chin and lifted her face toward mine.

The second our eyes met, another tear rolled down her cheek.Damn.That hurt to see.

My thumb brushed beneath her eye, wiping the tear away. Then I wiped away another one, and another.

“Mali.”

Her lips pressed together as she tried to get herself under control. It wasn’t working.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered again.

“I know,” I nodded slowly.

Because I did. More than she realized. I knew exactly what it felt like when somebody you loved turned into somebody you didn’t recognize. I knew what it felt like when reality didn’t match the version of a person you carried in your head. The difference was that I had years to make peace with all the shit that happened with my mom. She was being forced to face her family demon tonight. My hand settled against the side of her face.

“Look at me.”

Her eyes lifted. And when they did, they looked red. Her long lashes were wet, and I could see in those brown eyes that she was heartbroken. And for a second, I hated her father all over again for putting that look on her face. Not because he shot me, but because he put her in the middle. I brushed one final tear from her cheek before leaning forward and pressing a kiss against her forehead. A slow one. The kind that wasn’t about romance. It was filled with comfort and reassurance. It was just me trying to hold together the pieces of her world that had started cracking tonight. When I pulled back, her eyes closed briefly, and she let herself lean into me.

Chapter 5

Maliah

Istood there in Tahari’s arms and let myself cry. For once, I didn’t care how I looked.

I didn’t care that my makeup was probably ruined. I didn’t care that I had driven across town in the middle of the night. None of it seemed important anymore. The only thing that mattered was the fact that I was standing in the apartment of the man I loved after finding out my father had shot him. My father. The thought alone made fresh tears fill my eyes. Tahari’s arms tightened around me slightly as he rested his chin against the top of my head.

Neither one of us spoke. There wasn’t anything left to say. Not right now. I listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing and tried to make sense of everything. Still, my thoughts kept circling back to memories I had never paid much attention to before. MJ used to say things. Little comments here and there. Maybe some of them were jokes, maybe some were stories. They were all things I always brushed off.He ain’t just Dad. He was really outside. You act like Pops wasn’t a gangster. You don’t know our father like I know our father.Every time MJ said something like that, I rolled my eyes. To me, he was embellishing and being MJ. But standing here now, wrapped upin Tahari’s arms while blood seeped through a bandage beneath his shirt, those old conversations suddenly felt different.

They didn’t sound like jokes anymore. They sounded like warnings I never understood. Or probably never wanted to understand. This was the same man that would wear fairy wings on his back and run around the house with me when I was a little girl. The same man that would wear a crown and have tea parties with me. This shit couldn’t be real. I pulled back slightly and looked up at Tahari. His eyes met mine immediately. There was so much sitting behind them.

A mixture of pain, exhaustion, and concern looked back at me. And somehow, he was still worried about me. I hated that because he was the one who got hurt. Yet somehow, he was the one comforting me.

My gaze drifted over his face. I took in every little detail of his profile. It was the slight tension in his jaw. The tiredness beneath his eyes. The way he kept favoring his injured arm even when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. My chest tightened.

“I was so scared,” I admitted quietly.

Something softened in his expression.

“I know.”

My eyes filled again.

“When you wouldn’t answer…”

My voice trailed off. I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to because he already understood. He knew me inside and out. His hand lifted and brushed gently across my cheek.

The gesture was simple. It was so tender and so familiar. And just finding out some foreign shit, the act of something known for some reason… it almost made me cry all over again.

Instead, I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his. The kiss wasn’t rushed, and it wasn’t desperate. It wasn’t one of those just erratic acts. It was soft. It was the kind of kiss that happened when words stopped working. His hand settledcarefully against my waist as he kissed me back. For a few seconds, the rest of the world disappeared. Nothing of what I was going through mattered. Not in this moment. I felt free from it all. There were no questions. No fathers. No secrets. Besides hearing his nearby faucet dripping into the sink, nothing else mattered because it was just us.

When we finally pulled apart, neither one of us moved very far. Our foreheads rested together. The breaths he breathed out were the same ones I took in. We were sharing energy, and I needed this moment. I could still feel the weight of everything that had happened, but it felt lighter standing this close to him. Tahari brushed a kiss against my forehead again before resting his cheek against the top of my head. This time when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t crying. I was grateful. Grateful that he was alive. Grateful that I had found him. And grateful that, despite everything trying to pull us apart, I was still standing right here in his arms.

For a long moment, neither one of us moved. I stood there with my face buried against Tahari’s chest while he held me, one hand resting against my back and the other carefully cradling the side of my face. Every now and then his thumb brushed against my cheek, wiping away tears that seemed determined to keep falling. I hated crying. Always had, but tonight it felt like something inside me had cracked open, and I didn’t know how to put it back together. My father shot him. Even thinking the words felt wrong. It felt impossible. Like they belonged to somebody else’s life instead of mine.