Page 30 of Falling Into Gravity

“Maybe,” she said with a grin. “You look trappable.”

He shook his head, but his dimple cut deep when he smiled. “Don’t get cocky, Dorothy.”

“Stop callin’ me that,” she laughed.

“Imma call you Dorothy till you learn how to slap bones for real.” His voice was so euphoric. His Cali accent slid smoothly like he grew up with the ocean’s breeze in his lungs and kept Nipsey lyrics tucked under his tongue.

She pouted, but Malik just handed her another tile. Their fingers brushed and lingered, the air between them shifting just a little.

He didn’t look away.

Brown eyes weren’t nothing special, but his seemed to be. Aku could look into them for hours if he let her.

“You know,” he said low like he’d been fighting himself about saying what he wanted to say, “it’s somethin’ about you. Like you tryna act like you just passing through, just here for the weekend or whatever…but you got roots. The way you talk to folks, laugh with people, the way you just…be. I watched you with the kids that day you was out here on your super star stylist shit. They fuck with you and Crescent Park don’t fuck with many.”

Aku blinked, her throat tightening. She hated that he saw through her so quickly. “I don’t know if I’m ready to plant no roots,” she said, barely above a whisper.

There was a time when she knew for sure she was ready but Devin didn’t want that. Now, she questioned everything. Every feeling…every glance.

Malik nodded, picking up a domino and letting it tap against the hood of the car. “Ain’t nobody said you gotta be, butsometimes you fall before you even know it. And gravity? Shit, it don’t wait for no one.”

That made her quiet. She pushed her tongue into her cheek.

The song bumpin’ from the speaker shifted into an old R&B track—Joe or Avant or some old head joint she knew from car rides with Stephanie, her Granny. And for a second, it felt like the world had slowed down to make room for whatever was happening between her and Malik.

She looked down at the pieces, then back at him. “Teach me how to slap the bones, Malik.”

He smirked, eyes twinkling. “Say less.”

And with that, he grabbed her hand, adjusted her wrist just right, and helped her slap the next tile down on the hood with just enough force to make it echo through the block.

Aku giggled.

Malik leaned in closer. “You learnin’, Dorothy.”

She leaned a little too. “You teachin’, Malik…and I wanna learn.”

They weren’t just playing dominoes anymore. Unbeknownst to them, they were playing for each other’s hearts, one piece at a time.

chapter 7

. . .

Malik sat on the porch,his hoodie pulled low just watching, listening, and thinking. That was his thing—watchin…letting the night talk to him. Feeling the weight of it settle in his chest.

The app had been going up but he was in for the night. His body was tired, and his eyes already hurt from the coding he needed to do later.

New pings. New users. More encrypted threads filling up with neighborhood gossip, missing dog alerts, and anonymous confessions that made the neighborhood feel like it had a pulse of its own.

But Malik was in for the night.

His body felt like it had been dragged behind that old Chevy of his—tired in a way that didn’t just sit in his bones, but reached down and gripped his spirit. His eyes lowkey begged him not to look at another screen, and he still had shit to fix before the next backend update rolled out.

He loved coding.

But it wasn’t always like that. Pharoah was the leader. He’d linked up with one of the middle school teachers who taughthim how to code. Then one night when Malik was falling in too deep with the gang, Pharoah showed him the world he’d created, linking him with their technology teacher who taught both of them everything he knew. It had been Malik’s saving grace as a kid, when everything became too much. Their computer teacher planted the seed on what technology could do for the world and how it could make them rich men one day. The lessons stuck with Malik ’cause for the first time he wasn’t just a tall black kid who the world, kept pushing a ball into his hands as if sports was the only way out.

He could hoop, but his aspirations stopped at pick-up games with his boys.

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