Damaged Petals.

[Soapy]

lowkey jealous

two more weeks

Sarky Brice a meathead fr

sound like a real nigga to me

Jo’Ziah about to go get reacquainted with Rena. And Brice just gonna lay in bed alone while it happens. What we supposed to call that?

Connie just needs to go get knocked up again at this point. Talking about “my daughter.” Bih you ain’t got no daughter.

you gotta get ya cuck fantasies off somewhere else, sir

how else do you want her to describe her lmao

[Soapy]

Season 8, Episode 7
Brice settled into the aisle seat and watched the boarding door through his peripheral vision. He heard them before he saw them. They came through the curtain in a loose cluster. Jo’Ziah came through last, a duffel over one shoulder, and his eyes moved across the cabin. They landed on Brice for a beat. Brice gave him the nod. Jo’Ziah returned it, slow, and then he was through the curtain and gone, heading to the back with the rest of them.

The curtain fell closed.

Brice looked out the window at the tarmac. One corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, and he let it.

Serena was beside him with her legs crossed and her eyes already closed. She had on the white linen set she’d bought on the last day. He looked back out the window. The plane began to move.

He waited until they were in the air, until the seatbelt sign clicked off and the cabin settled into its cruise-altitude hum.

“Hey,” he said.

She opened one eye. "Yeah?"

"I don’t want to make this weird."

She opened both eyes now and looked at him with the particular expression she used when she was deciding whether this was worth waking up for. “What?”

“Jo’Ziah,” he said. Just the name. Clean and simple.

She sat up slightly. “What about him?”

“I’m just…you said you guys went to the same school.”

“We did,” she said.

"You guys seem closer than that."

Serena uncrossed her legs and straightened up in her seat. “I mean, we were friends. In high school. We hung out a few times."

"Just y’all?"

"I don’t know, once or twice probably," Serena shrugged, "I was friends with him."

“Okay,” he said.

She looked at him. “Okay?”

“I thought you said you guys just went to the same school.”

“We did go to the same school.”

“Right, but you just said you hung out a few times. Just the two of you.” He turned his head toward her. “You made it seem like he was just around sometimes, not that you guys were actually friends."

She sat back against the headrest and looked at the seat in front of her. “Brice.”

“I’m just trying to make sense of it."

"I’m trying to make sense of how we ended up in Bahamas with your homeboys instead of going on that trip to Bali like we were supposed to. Just us."

He held her gaze for a second. Then he looked down at his hands, and he let the silence do something, and then he said, carefully, “I just think that if we’re actually going to do this—“

“Do what?”

“Be together. For real. Come out as a couple, which is what I wanted this trip to be about.” He kept his voice measured. He had learned this from his session. A structure. Name the thing you want and put the honesty question inside it. “I can’t do that if I feel like there are things you’re not telling me. A real relationship needs trust. It needs honesty. That’s the foundation. I’m not trying to make this into something. I just want to know who I’m with.”

Serena looked at him for a long moment.

“Nigga, you’re something else,” she scoffed.

He shrugged.

"You got some fucking nerve talking about trust and honesty."

He didn’t respond. He let the silence take the shape of the cabin around them, the low engine noise, the distant sound of the drink cart starting somewhere behind the curtain, the muffled laugh of someone in coach.

He didn’t fill it.

He had learned that too. The silence was its own kind of pressure, and the thing about pressure was that it didn’t need your help. It just needed time.

Serena sat with her arms crossed and her jaw set for a while.

Four minutes. Maybe five.

“It was nothing,” she said finally.

He didn’t move.

“I’m sure you know how it is in high school,” she said it to the seat in front of her, not to him. “Like once or twice. It wasn’t serious, it wasn’t a relationship, it was just…it was a long time ago. It didn’t mean nothing back then and it definitely doesn’t mean nothing right now."

The cabin hummed.

He kept his eyes on the wing. The engine was a constant sound, a sound you could put yourself inside if you needed to, and he was inside it now, using it the way he used the circles on James’s back in the dark of the living room, something to hold onto while everything else moved.

“Okay,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Okay?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

He reached forward and pulled the in-flight magazine from the seat pocket and opened it to a page in the middle without reading a word of it. His jaw was loose. His face was easy. He turned a page he hadn’t read.

Rena.

He turned another one.

…

Tom pulled into the driveway at half past three. He had moved a two o’clock call to the morning and left Darren to handle the rest of it, which Darren was more than capable of doing and Tom knew that, but he had still called twice from the car anyway just to confirm.

He could hear it before he was fully through the door. Not crying exactly, more like that specific pre-cry frequency that James had been working with lately, that low grinding fuss that meant he was tired and not going to admit it.

Liz was in the armchair with James against her shoulder, doing the slow back-and-forth rock she had perfected over twenty years ago with Brice and apparently hadn’t lost. She looked up when Tom came in but her rhythm didn’t break.

“You’re early,” she said.

“Moved some things around,” he said. He loosened his collar and looked at James. “How is he?”

“Tired,” she said. “Fought his nap.”

Tom nodded and moved toward the kitchen for a glass of water. He stood at the sink and drank it and looked out the window at the backyard and thought about the drive to the airport. He refilled his glass.

“What time you want to leave?” he called through to the living room.

Liz pressed her lips together slightly. She adjusted James against her shoulder. “I actually called Brice this morning."

He set the glass down and looked at her. She was still rocking James, her eyes on the baby now.

Tom waited.

“I told him we’d bring James by the house tomorrow morning instead,” she said. “He just got back from a trip. He should have one night to settle in, get some rest.”

Tom looked at her for a moment.

“When were you going to tell me this?” he asked.

“I’m telling you now," she answered, "The day got away from me."

Tom moved to the couch and sat down on the edge of it, not settling back, just perching. He put his forearms on his knees and looked at the floor for a second. Then he looked at her.

“You can’t keep doing this."

“Doing what?"

"Not letting the boy be a father."

“I am helping him.”

“You’re helping him not have to deal with his own kid after a four day trip,” Tom said. “That’s part of being a parent."

She looked at him.

“He is twenty-two years old,” she said quietly, as if she didn’t want James to register the edge in it. “He lost the mother of his child. He is raising an infant alone while preparing for the biggest year of his career. If I can give him one extra night of sleep, I am going to do that.”

“And the night after that? And the night after that?”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“I’m being realistic,” Tom said. “You give him the parachute, he’s going to use it. Every time. You should know that by now. We’ve been babying that boy his whole life."

Liz looked back down at James, who had gone quiet against her shoulder, his breathing evening out into something slower. She kept her hand moving in the small circles on his back.

“You want to talk about what Brice does and doesn’t do as a father?” she said. “This same Brice who, when he was given custody of this baby, could have handed him to us. Could have said yes when we offered. When you stood there and did fucking nothing and let out grandson go because you wanted a fucking empty house to do whatever the fuck it is you’re doing these days."

The room was quiet except for James’s breathing.

Tom looked at the floor.

“That’s not what happened,” he said.

“That is exactly what happened,” she said, still quiet, still even. “I watched you let him walk out with that baby when we both knew we were better positioned to—“

“To what? To raise his kid for him?” Tom looked up. “You hear yourself?”

“To support him. Properly. With structure and stability and—“

“He’s not some fifteen year old kid anymore, Liz. He’s a man. He can do this. He should do this. It’s his duty to do this."

“He’s still not ready and you know it."

Tom sat back against the couch cushion. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye for a second and then dropped it. James made a small sound against Liz’s shoulder and she shushed him softly, the sound automatic, built into her somewhere at a level below thought.

Tom watched her do it.

“He is that boy’s father,” Tom said finally. "We can’t keep bailing him out. At some point, he’s got to come off the tit."

…

The courtroom was smaller than she remembered.

That was the first thing Nia noticed when the CO walked her through the side door and the room opened up around her. She had built it into something larger in her head over the past four months, something cathedral and crushing, but it was just a room with shitty lighting and wood paneling that had gone dull with age.

Her attorney, Ms. Vega, was already at the table. She stood briefly when Nia came in and touched her arm once, guiding her to the chair on the left. Nia sat down and put her hands flat on the table the way Ms. Vega had told her to. Calm. Still. Don’t fidget.

She kept her eyes forward.

She made it maybe thirty seconds before she looked.

They were in the second row on the right side, directly in her eyeline if she turned her head even slightly. She recognized them from pictures. She had seen them before, in the background of things, at the edges of social media posts she had studied for longer than she should have. Skylar’s mother had her hair pulled back and her hands folded in her lap. Her father sat beside her with his jaw set and his shoulders squared, the posture of a man who had decided before arriving what kind of man he was going to be in this room.

They were already looking at her.

Nia looked away.

Her hands were still flat on the table. She could feel her pulse in her fingertips.

She looked at the wood grain in front of her. There was a scratch running diagonally across it, thin and old, probably from someone’s ring or a pen dragged at the wrong angle years ago. She followed it with her eyes from one end to the other and then back again.

She could still feel them.

It wasn’t something she could have explained to Dr. Ellison or Ms. Vega or anyone who hadn’t sat in this chair. It was a physical thing. A heat on the right side of her face. The particular quality of a gaze that wasn’t just looking, that was pressing. She had felt it from gas station clerks whenever she would walk into the store. She had felt it from the teachers at St. Joe’s, right before she got kicked out. She had felt it from girls in the unit. She knew the difference between someone looking at you and someone deciding what you were.

They had decided.

She didn’t blame them for that.

That was the thing she couldn’t figure out how to carry. The not blaming them. Because she understood it completely, she understood the shape of it, the way grief could turn outward and find a target and fix itself there with a kind of terrible relief. She understood it because she had done the same thing after Jimmy. She had fixed her grief onto things and people and finally onto herself, and it had lived there and grown there and eventually it had driven her to a house she didn’t belong in with a baby in her arms and a woman bleeding on the floor.

She had done that.

She had been the thing that happened to their daughter.

Ms. Vega was organizing papers beside her. The bailiff moved somewhere near the front of the room. Someone behind Nia cleared their throat. She looked at the scratch in the table.

She thought about what Dr. Ellison had said, that being fair to yourself wasn’t making excuses. She had been turning that over for days, weeks now. She still didn’t know what to do with it. Because being fair to herself meant holding both things at once, the grief and the choices, the falling and the landing, the two years of being driven by something she didn’t understand and the afternoon at the end of those two years where she had walked into Skylar’s house.

She couldn’t hold both things. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

What she could hold was this. The scratch in the wood. Ms. Vega’s papers. The buzz of the light. The CO standing near the door with his keys at his hip.

“All rise.”

She rose.

The judge came in and took his seat and the room settled and Ms. Vega leaned slightly toward her and said something quiet about procedure, about what to expect in the next twenty minutes, about how Nia didn’t need to speak unless directly addressed. Nia nodded without turning her head.

The proceedings started. She heard her name said in a formal register, the charges read aloud in language that was clean and clinical and had nothing of that afternoon in it, nothing of the sound or the weight of the baby in her arms. Just counts. Just degrees. Just the language the law used when it was deciding what a person was worth and what they owed.

She kept her hands flat.

She looked at the judge.

She did not look to the right.

But she felt them the entire time, that fixed, pressing weight from the second row, and she sat inside it and kept her breathing even and tried to remember what Dr. Ellison had said about context mattering, about being a teenager and trying to survive something, about the difference between moving through the world and choosing to destroy it.

She hadn’t chosen this.

But she had gotten here.

And Skylar’s mother was twelve feet away with her hands folded in her lap, and her daughter was gone, and no amount of context in the world changed the shape of that.

The judge said something. Ms. Vega wrote something down.

Nia looked at the scratch in the table and breathed in and breathed out and stayed very still.

…

“So,” LaPenna said. “The Bahamas.”

“The Bahamas,” Brice confirmed.

LaPenna picked up his cup. He wasn’t reaching for the notepad yet. He rarely did anymore, and Brice had stopped noticing when that changed. “How was it?”

“It was fine,” Brice said. “Resort was nice. Food was good.”

LaPenna waited.

Brice looked at the succulent on the corner of the desk. It had a new leaf on it, small and pale green, curled in on itself like it hadn’t fully committed yet.

“Apparently I was there with one of my Eskimo bros," Brice scoffed.

"Eskimo bro?"

"You’re old as shit," Brice laughed. It was genuine this time. "He fuc…we’ve slept with the same girl. Serena."

"Serena." LaPenna’s repeated.

"Yeah."

"This was one of your teammates?"

"Jo’Ziah," Brice turned the name in his head, "One of the transfers."

LaPenna held his cup in both hands and let the room do what it did. Brice had counted once. The man could sit in silence for forty-five seconds without any visible discomfort. It used to make Brice want to climb out of his own skin. Now it just felt like the room breathing.

“She told me on the plane back,” Brice said. “That they hooked up. In high school. Once or twice, she said. Nothing serious.” He turned his cup on the side table without picking it up. “Said it was a long time ago.”

"That was honest of her."

Brice looked at him.

"I guess," Brice shrugged, "Took some prodding but she spilled it eventually. I used some of the shit we’ve spoken about in here. You know, naming what you want, being honest about your expectations, all that shit."

“And how did that feel? Using it that way?”

“At least now I know you’re not full of shit,” Brice let out a small chuckle. Then, after a beat, “And then it felt like shit because of what she actually said.”

LaPenna nodded, slow.

“Walk me through it,” he said. “What was the first thing you felt when she told you?”

Brice looked at the ceiling. The vent hummed. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

He dropped his gaze back down. He pressed his thumb into the edge of his thumbnail hard enough to feel it. “Like he had something on me.”

“Say more.”

“Jo’Ziah,” Brice shook his head. "Like, he knew this whole time, you know? He fucked her and didn’t tell me. He either knew that I didn’t know or thought I did. Either way, he fucked her. She’s mine and he was already there before I was."

LaPenna set his cup down.

“She’s mine,” LaPenna repeated.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” LaPenna said. “I want to make sure you know what you mean.”

Brice looked at the floor. "I’m not saying like I own her or some patriarchal bullshit."

“Isn’t it?” LaPenna asked.

Brice’s jaw shifted.

“I’m not saying that as a criticism,” LaPenna continued. “I’m asking you to be honest about what the feeling actually is. Because if we name it wrong, we can’t work with it.”

Brice uncrossed his ankle and put both feet flat on the floor. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at the space between them.

“I feel like she’s not just mine,” he said. “Like obviously she isn’t some fucking virgin. Trust me, I know she’s not. But…my teammate though? She could have fucked anybody else but a teammate? He’s going to walk into practice and look at me and he’s going to know something. He’s been knowing that. He knows he got something on me and I was either too stupid to know it or too much of a bitch to do something about it."

“What does he have on you, specifically?”

“He had her first.”

“In high school,” LaPenna said. “Years before you met her.”

“I know that.”

“Does knowing it help?”

Brice looked at him. “No.”

LaPenna nodded like that was exactly the right answer. He picked his cup back up. “Brice, I want to ask you something and I’d like you to think about where it’s coming from before you answer.”

Brice nodded.

“When you say he has something on you,” LaPenna said, “What is the thing, exactly, that you feel you’re losing?”

Brice was quiet for a long moment.

“I guess control,” he said finally. "Maybe ownership like you said."

“Of Serena?”

“Of the…“ he pressed his hands together. “Of the story. Of the situation. Of what’s mine. Of knowing that the thing I’m building is actually mine and not something I’m just…stepping into after someone else already walked through it.”

LaPenna was quiet.

“You hear Skylar in that?” he asked.

The room went very still.

Brice looked at the plant. The new leaf hadn’t moved. Of course it hadn’t moved. It was a plant.

“That’s different,” Brice said.

“Is it?”

“Skylar and I had a whole history. That wasn’t about…“

“You spent a significant portion of your relationship with Skylar uncertain about where you stood,” LaPenna said, carefully. “Your relationship started in a lie. A lie you both contributed to against a person that you both cared about. You found that hard to get past. To take Skylar serious as a partner."

“I know what we’ve talked about.”

“And the feeling you’re describing right now—“

“Is not the same thing,” Brice cut him off.

LaPenna didn’t react to it. He just waited.

Brice pressed his palms together and looked at the floor. He could feel the shape of the argument he wanted to make, the one where this was different, where Serena was different, where he was different now, older and more settled and past the version of himself who had needed to white-knuckle his way through every relationship. He could feel the whole architecture of it. He just couldn’t find the foundation.

“I know it’s irrational,” he said, quieter.

“I didn’t say it was irrational.”

“It is though.” He sat back. “I know that. She was in high school. I wasn’t even in her life. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No,” LaPenna agreed. “She didn’t.”

“Feels like she did, though."

LaPenna looked at him steadily. “Because the feeling isn’t about what she did. The feeling is about what it means to you to have something that’s fully yours. No history. No prior claim. No one in the room who knew her before you did.”

He paused. “That’s what you’re actually looking for. And I think you know, on some level, that that’s not something another person can give you.”

Brice looked at the window. There wasn’t much of a view, just the side of the building next door and a narrow strip of sky. He had looked at that window a hundred times.

“So what do I do with it?” he asked.

“Right now? Honestly? Nothing,” LaPenna said. “You sit with it. You don’t act on it. You don’t let it drive decisions. You just let it be an uncomfortable feeling that you’re aware of, instead of a conclusion you’ve already reached.”

…

"Bitch, you was supposed to take with you to the fucking grave," Sabrina shook her head.

"He knew," Serena wiped at her eyes, "I don’t know how but he fucking knew. Brice doesn’t ask questions like that. He doesn’t ask me about shit. He barely fucking remembers your names sometimes. He fucking knew, I’m telling you."

“Or Jo’Ziah told him,” Kennedi said from the other end of the couch. “That’s also a possibility.”

Serena looked at her.

“I’m just saying,” Kennedi shrugged. “You said it yourself. Brice doesn’t ask questions like that. Something put it in his head.”

“Jo’Ziah would not—“ Serena stopped. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I don’t know what Jo’Ziah would or wouldn’t do. I don’t know that nigga like that anymore.”

“You knew him well enough,” Sabrina muttered.

“Sabrina.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m just saying.”

Serena pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at the television, which was on but muted, some home renovation show with a couple pointing at countertops.

“He fucking played me,” she said, mostly to herself, "I can’t believe I fucking told him."

“Obviously this isn’t great news,” Sabrina said, “But like so what? Y’all were in fucking high school."

“He’s Brice’s teammate.”

“It ain’t your fault the nigga transferred here."

“It doesn’t matter,” Serena said. “I might as well have sucked his dick right there in their locker room. He’s never going to let this go.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know him,” she said it flat and certain in a way that settled the room for a moment.

Kennedi set her cup down on the coffee table.

“Can I just point something out?” Kennedi said.

“Do you have to?”

“Brice ain’t exactly a saint,” Kennedi said. “We all know this."

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because it just is,” Serena shook his head. "You know how niggas are."

"Fuck that,” Kennedi sucked her teeth. "These niggas can’t be having their cake and wanting to eat it too. You fucked a nigga years ago. He probably fucked a bitch last month."

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying. If you were able to get over that, he should be able to get over this."

“I know,” Serena said.

“Then say that to him.”

“I already told him it was a long time ago. I said it wasn’t serious.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her knee. “He said okay.

Kennedi was quiet.

Sabrina leaned back against the arm of the couch. She looked at Serena for a moment. “He took you on the trip though. Clearly he cares about you. He’ll get over it.”

“They went on a boy’s trip and I was there.”

“He put you in first class. Bitch, I was in economy begging for a snack.”

"That doesn’t mean anything," Serena buried her head into her hands.

“Girl, he is not going to walk away from you over something that happened before you met. He loves you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“This nigga was talking about taking you to fucking Bali. Niggas will show you they love you before they tell you."

Serena uncurled herself from the couch and stood up, moving to the window. Outside the parking lot was gray and still, a few cars sitting under the flat afternoon sky. She had been in this apartment for three hours and she had not eaten anything and she was not going to eat anything because her stomach had been a closed fist since the plane and it hadn’t loosened yet.

She had done everything right. That was the part that sat in her chest like something she couldn’t swallow. She had been patient. She had adjusted her expectations and recalibrated her timeline and swallowed things she shouldn’t have had to swallow and shown up when she had every reason not to. She had watched him navigate the worst year of his life and she had stayed in her lane and not made it about herself and she had been exactly what he needed her to be, which sometimes meant being very little, and she had done all of that without complaint because she understood the long game.

And now she was standing at a window in West Lafayette looking at a parking lot wondering if one conversation on a plane had undone all of it.

[Caesar]

He lost the mother of his child.

Not Liz saying this like they were together If they were, she probably wouldn't have gotten her wig split.

She’s mine

I don't think the patriarchy is what we're worried about here

Serena a rookie. She should've pinned that body on a homegirl and said Jo'Ziah tried to the hit the cycle in the friend group and she shot him down.

[Captain Canada]

Jo'Ziah should be charged rent for how much real estate he takes up in Brice's mind

[Soapy]

He lost the mother of his child.

Not Liz saying this like they were together If they were, she probably wouldn't have gotten her wig split.

She’s mine

I don't think the patriarchy is what we're worried about here

Serena a rookie. She should've pinned that body on a homegirl and said Jo'Ziah tried to the hit the cycle in the friend group and she shot him down.

How else would you describe her lmao she is his child's mother



Is that what you be doing to avoid the allegations?

Jo'Ziah should be charged rent for how much real estate he takes up in Brice's mind

can't blame the young lad

he popped his bitch

[djp73]

so insecure

[Soapy]

so insecure

[Soapy]

the bump craze has gotten out of hand

[Soapy]

and im partially to blame

[Soapy]