“Same. I love you, bébé.” There was no hesitation in his words, or in the way his eyes locked with mine when he said it.

Since I’d dropped out of the DA race so much had changed for me. I’d stayed in my job, determined to use the power I had to actually make changes in how we dealt with racial justice in the county. My first step, with the new DA’s blessing, was heading an initiative to work more closely with advocacy groups in the region.

We were listening to the struggle that minorities faced in our communities and how law enforcement was falling short. We’d been building bridges into parts of the county that we’d neglected for too long. I’d learned more about myself and the kind of prosecutor I wanted to be in the last six months than I had in the previous five years. I wouldn’t say being with Patrice had made me do it, but his presence in my life had certainly been the catalyst for me to take bolder steps. To examine how I wanted to show up in my job. To live up to the responsibility I’d been given. I had to be humble enough to admit that being an ally in words but not action was not enough, and in the end, I hadn’t learned how to be one for every person I was tasked with serving. But I was determined to do better.

A rumbling sound got my focus back on the man in question, as he gently pressed on my chest. “Did I lose you?”

I shook my head as he ran a hand over my bare skin. The contact bringing me fully back to the moment and him. “Never, you’re stuck with me, professor.” I felt a ghost of a smile on the side of my face.

“That I know, especially now that you’ve gone and done this. I have to keep you,” he said as he touched the red Scotch Bonnet pepper I’d had tattooed on my right hipbone on our last weekend trip to New York. The little pepper was a hard to find ingredient in all the Haitian dishes Patrice and I tried to make together. So I got it as a joke, or at least I’d said it was. But we both knew it was more than that. Patrice had claimed possession of that particular part of my body and tended to it like I’d transplanted a part of himself and tattooed it on my skin.

I could not say that I was very upset about it.