"Stay there."
If the scene had been clipped from a movie, Eve reckons the pregnant lighting in the café would dwindle from the golden warmth of their heart-to-heart, to something sombre and eery and dismal, a Stygian shade of blue, because she's sure she sees it, sincerely feels it.
Jahseh is slow in his manner as he lifts himself out of his seat, proceeds for the door and all but prowls towards the car park. All the time rubbernecked to the hooded cretin pulling on the door handle of his car. There's something enthralling about the stealth to his approach, the composure to his sunken shoulders, the sluggishness to his spaced strides. Eve teeters on the edge of her seat, dead in her tracks, fighting the urge to get up and nosily follow after him.
In a plethora of sore thumbs, Jahseh's car is patently the sorest. It's so big and demanding of attentionâEve is curious who in their right mind would think to steal it, on daylight's doorstep of all. The mystery is quickly solved as Jahseh reaches the poor excuse for a carjacker, tugging away in the tranquility of his oblivion. That is, until Jahseh rips off his hood like he intends to take his head along with it. Eve guffaws, the kid practically pirouettes in his spot, and the mouthful of profanities and bungled threats he'd readied himself to hail down on any man unlucky enough to catch him in the act is incontinently stalled at the sight of Jahseh.
Or rather, at Jahseh's prompt fistful of his neck, because within seconds, he's flush against the car and lifted up into the air by the flesh beneath his jaw like the bag of piss he essentially is.
By the time Eve is out of her seat and scuttling across the car park, the kid is a blubbering plight of pleas and tears and flailing legs, to each of which Jahseh returns with a vacant stare.
"âplease, man! Please! I-I-I-I-I swear, I ain't know t-thaâI just-t-tâ"
She's never heard a stutter like it in her life.
"Jahseh! Put him down!" Eve hisses, flustered full bore. The booming cadence of her heartbeat in her ears is an unworthy rival to the bloodcurdling wails the boy operas about the car park. Yet Jahseh ignores the both of them.
"I-I-I didn't know it was your câ"
"Jahseh!" Eve ambles all the closer, and Jahseh belatedly allows the kid's feet to return to the floor, but that chokehold doesn't let up in the slightest. Eve looks between the twoâthe man and the boyâat a loss for words or any type of mediation. And then she double-takes at the boy, because she's sure she knows him from somewhere. "Look, what are you doing going around messing with people's cars at half seven in the morning? Don't you have school?"
But the boy can't bring himself to break away from Jahseh's glare, as if a blink is all it'll take to turn this attempted robbery into a homicide. Besides, any word he can even attempt to issue in his defence is nimbly dammed behind Jahseh's stapled grip around his throat. He stares at the boy as if he dares him not to answer her, yet in the same held breath uses every last tendon in his hand to make sure he can't.
"I-I-I..."
"Ease up, come on. He's a kid."
Eve sort of half shuffles between them, a hand per each of Jahseh's steadfast arms to soothe him out of his grip. And when she turns to the boy once again, he looks as if he could kiss her feet in sheer gratitude. But even now, she can't shake that eery familiarity. His clothes are oversized and he's brazenly underweight, if truth be told very easily on the cusp of malnourishment. His skin is dirty and dry, dry as in panelled with more cracks than a whip. His lips plump and bruised. And the air about him is sorely pungent with the hardline incense of body odourâor just straight piss.
"I'mâI d-don't... Iâ"
"Oi! You stole my bag!"
There's a brief lull between the three as the plot thickens and then double-dutch twists. The kid takes a step and then Jahseh's fist is wedged full of his hoodie before he can think to take another. Amidst her disbelief, Eve is regretful to her outburst and the whiplash ofâalthough self inflicted and more or less deservedâconsequences it quickly hails onto the boy, but the uncanny coincidence is enough to convince her there's a higher purpose at work here. Because really, what are the odds?
She's so overcome by the raw adrenaline bursting through her veins, she almost misses the hurricane of coughing fits the boy croaks out. He fights to breathe through the splinter of throat he has left to work with, but his hoodie is stiff around his neck like a noose. Jahseh is unstirred by the fact.
"I'm-I'm sorry, man! Please!"
Eve's hands are about her like she can extinguish the issue at hand with some fresh air and intimacy, "Look, calm down. Everyone just calm down. You need to relax, we're not the policeâ"
"Call them! Please, man! J-Just let me go!"
Eve frowns. Now that's just stupid, she inwardly tuts. "Look, you stole my bagâmy Goyard bag. That ain't petty theft, that's robbery. You're better off talking to me than the police. I'm justâ"
Even through his tears, the kid scoffs, "He'll kill me, he's g-gonna killâ"
"Huh?" Jahseh gruffs out. For a minute there, Eve had been sure he had in his outrage fully bygone the ability to speak, but as he finally does, between that and the fiery bass in his tone, the boy only cries even harder. Eve sees Jahseh as she's never seen him before. The unadulterated grit in his eyes alone, clear-cut and heart-stoppingâin more ways than oneârender Eve momentarily speechless. Genuinely, less speech than a mute. His anger is so exacting of awe, you're practically stilted to stop and just cowardly stare. "What you say?"
Eve frowns, "Jaâ"
"Please! I-I-I-I'll give the bagâ"
"Yeah, I know you will. In fact, what's your name, you twat?" Jahseh interrogates. Eve eyes the shuddering rhythm to the boy's chest and in all honesty can't help but to think he's being the teensiest bit dramatic. No one had done him anything really; the car's still here and she's yet to kick up a proper fuss about her bagâwhat's with all the crying? The boy shakes his head, the misty-eyed pout and dread to his gaze in no way soften the smack Jahseh sends to the middle of his forehead. "Don't insult me. Talk."
"I-I... K-K-K-Kamâ"
"Spit it out, then." Jahseh thinks it hilarious, but by no means of his face. It's cemented into its glare, the curled lip and the furrowed brows and the levelled lour. There's something so unbearably dark about it allâthe ferocity of their situation, the character it'd summoned out of him. It seems harder to breathe, heavier to stand, harder to watch. But while Jahseh is stifled in the quietest corner of his mind by the fact, the darkness to Eve is not in any account within or without Jahseh, but teeming from the shaken boy in his grasp. "You think I won't punch off your wig, you patty? And you smell like a fucking toilet. You're gonna piss me off, y'know. Properly."
"K-Kamale."
Eve shifts her gaze to Jahseh, who stares down at the boy like he's worth no more than the crumbs of dirt beneath their shoes. She wants to speak, truly, but the experience is bordering outer-body, so her thoughts remain just that. She watches as his two minds become one, and then he speaks and the words all but solidify as he says them. "You got twelveâno, eleven hours to return that bag how you took it, from where you took it. Make me come and get it myself, Kamale."
As soon as Jahseh releases him, he all but dematerialises on the spot.
Eve stares after him as he goes.
"Do you know him? How d'you know he'll bother bringing it back?" Jahseh, dissolving slowly but surely into a state of himself she's much more accustomed to, only spares his retreating frame one look and one alone. Then he takes a hand to the low of Eve's back, and ushers her away from the car and instead forlornly towards the oasis the two had sought and since neglected in the café.
"He will."
All along, I intended for this kid to exist and to be called Marcus, I don't know why Marcus was so prominent in my head or why I abandoned it and went for Kamale.
I also had every intention of reading over this chapter because something about it was just not giving to me but I got bored so this will have to do.
Thoughts?
And I want to know: does the way I've written it or the situation and how it transpired make it seem as though Kamale was scared that he got caught or that he was scared that he'd been caught by Jahseh?
Thoughts on Jahseh and his temper... I had to watch a few videos of Fredo because I chose him for Jahseh off of the way he speaks, I just cannot replicate it in the slightest, LOL. He's so funny and rude and he talks like a proper nigga, I'm just a girl. Sigh.
Thoughts on Kamale?
Thanks for tuning in and voting and commenting, guys. This story is so refreshing to write for me, so 2 votes or 200 votes makes me smile either way.
See ya when I see ya.