“But also maybe don’t be too visible in the windows, you see a cop or whatever,” I said.

“Or, you know what. It’s whatever. I’m not trippin,” I said, clearly trippin.

I slammed the side sliding door shut.

I reopened the side sliding door.

“And text or knock on the cab door, ya need to piss or whatever,” I added.

The door to the cab was a legit house door, with a lock and everything.

Roomie bro waved me off like I got it.

On the drive, I learned things about roomie bro’s wifey one only learns talking like you talk, unselfconscious and introspective, when facing the same direction watching the road fly past at 65 m.p.h. for some time.

Was proven wrong in things I’d assumed.

Her dad a military guy who kept bugging her about getting strapped.

When roomie bro went out to Cali to meet him last spring, he kept bringing it up.

“It’s not about wanting to kill anybody. It’s just logical, as a woman, to be armed in this day and age,” was his case.

A thing roomie bro and I did regularly was get lit off the trees out on our stoop.

I’d be at the end of an addie cycle, all burnt and beat but unable to sleep, he’d be at the end of a long workweek, and he’d come downstairs proffering a spliff like,

“Splee?”

Splee Time.

It was never scheduled, but happened with a regularity like it was.

When it was time you just knew.

“Exactly what I fkng need rn bro,” I’d say, slamming the Walk Book Word doc shut.

I used to get so pissed at him for conflating his past relationship with his ex with mine and ex bae’s.

I’d always pull the same card. Always ride the line between helplessness and rage.

“I just don’t understand,” I’d say, looking out onto twilit 41st Street: Mount Olivet housing project across the way; the pyramidal silhouette, topped with a cross, of Church of the Living God, beyond that. “This whole thing of ceasing all contact the minute you stop fucking with someone. What is that? I feel like that’s reverse-sus. Like counterintuitively sexist. It says, Sure, we acted like we were a lot of different things to each other: friends, fam, each other’s cheerleaders, intellectual companions. But nah. We were pretending. We were only fuckmates. Trial mates. And now that you done failed the test—ain’t got no more reasons to fuck with you bruh!

“It’s so Darwinian, y’know?”