Grip Trilogy Box Set - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,213

it’s my own private utopia.

“Then I’ll see you after work.” I smile and turn to go.

“Hey Bris,” he calls.

I look over my shoulder to find that sober look back in his eyes, tightening the skin over his high cheekbones, making me nervous.

“I love you.”

He says it to me every day, several times a day, and it never gets old, never frays around the edges or fails to palpitate my susceptible heart.

“I love you, too.”

I don’t try to lighten the moment with an easy smile or a flippant comment. Whatever is bothering him, he’ll tell me, probably tonight. I’ll let him come to it on his own.

In the meantime, Kevin.

Chapter 2

Grip

I HAVE to tell her tonight.

I’ve been putting it off, but I need to register for next semester. Getting my degree online has always worked for the busy pace of my life, but Dr. Israel Hammond, renowned criminal justice activist, will be a guest professor at NYU, and I need to be on campus. His book about racism in America completely rocked my world, and I need to take that class.

Rationally, I know it won’t wreck us if I spend a semester in New York and Bristol stays here in LA. We survived eight years of games— chase, hide and seek, pin the tail on the donkey, with each of us playing the role of jackass from time to time. You name it, we played it. We survived Parker’s sick attempts to destroy us, and he’s stewing in a minimum-security resort-like prison suite because we figured out how to shut him down. We survived contempt and condemnation from people as distant as Black Twitter trolls and as close as members of my family who didn’t want to see us together. They are slowly, surely, one by one, coming around. Jade will be the hold out; I know this, but eventually she’ll see the light, too.

We win. Love prevails. I get it.

But that doesn’t make the reality of me being on one coast while Bris lives on the other any easier to accept, even for a few months— not with the way I need her.

I flip our steaks, losing myself in thought and the smoke rising from the grill. Do I have to go? I’m a rapper, an entertainer . . . do I really want to uproot my life for five months just to sit at the feet of some professor I don’t even know?

Hell yeah I do.

When I’m forty years old, I don’t want to still be just rapping. Jay-Z is a hip-hop unicorn. Who else is out there rapping and relevant at almost fifty?

I’ll wait . . .

Yeah. Like I said. Dude’s a unicorn.

I’m passionate about the causes affecting my community, and I’m educating myself now, equipping myself now so I don’t squander this platform I’ve been given, but use it to do some kind of good. We have problems, and Dr. Hammond may have solutions. He’s a brilliant man who, even as he rails against the system, is smart enough to work within it, who cares enough to reform it.

“Mmmmm, that looks good.”

The comment grabs my attention, and I find myself smiling for the first time since I left Bristol. As she walks toward me, the approaching sunset paints the roof in shadows, but I see her clearly. Dark hair, burnished in places, falls around her shoulders. She has already discarded the dress she wore at lunch today in favor of a T-shirt and nothing else; it’s the one I just tossed into the hamper.

She tugs at my HABITUAL LINE STEPPER T-shirt, the hem landing at the top of her thighs. Where the T-shirt stops, my eyes keep going, past the lean muscles of her legs and the cut of her calves, the delicate bones of her ankles and to her bare feet. I love this girl, head to toe. Beyond this gorgeous packaging, it’s everything beneath that makes me beyond grateful she’s mine. The loyalty, the bottom- less pit that is her heart, her sense of humor. The toughest girl I know is also the most tender, and I’m so honored I get to see both sides, all her sides.

“You out of clean clothes?” I nod to my T-shirt. “You gotta wear my dirty stuff now?”

An impish smile tugs at her bare lips. She’s washed away her makeup, and with it, all the sophistication she wraps around herself for her job. Up on this roof in my T-shirt, she’s just my girl. I love her in every