Come on, anybody. I’ll go easy. Nobody answered. A few uncomfortable laughs. Somebody’s dad shook his head and turned back to the grill. The silence that followed wasn’t respectful. It was the silence of people who found him exhausting, but didn’t want the confrontation of saying so out loud.
That silence seemed to bother Tyler more than an outright challenge would have. He scanned the crowd, and I felt it before I saw it. The exact moment his eyes landed on me, standing near the drink table with my lemonade, unremarkable, unbothered. “What about you, Colonel?” he said, and the crowd’s attention shifted toward me like a tide changing direction.
He’d taken to calling me that as a joke months earlier, a mocking little nickname because Malik had let it slip once that I served. And Tyler had decided it was funny. A woman with a rank nobody in the neighborhood took seriously. You’re always so quiet, so calm. I bet you think you could take me.
I didn’t answer. I took a sip of my lemonade. He crossed the pavement toward me, unzipped the small gym bag he’d apparently brought for exactly this moment, and pulled out a pair of MMA gloves, red and worn from use, and dropped them at my feet. They hit the concrete with a soft thud that somehow silenced the entire block.
String lights swayed overhead. Somebody’s phone came up, already filming. Felt every eye on that street turn toward us at once. Come on, Colonel Tyler said loud enough for everyone to hear. That same performative grin plastered across his face. Put your money where your mouth is.
I haven’t said a word, I said quietly. Exactly. He shot back, playing to the crowd now, feeding off the attention. You never do. You just walk around acting like you’re better than everybody. Like you know something the rest of us don’t. So show us.
Or is the tough guy act just for civilians who don’t know any better? I felt Malik’s eyes on me from across the yard, frozen mid throw, football forgotten in his hands. I felt Gregory’s presence, too, drifting closer, phone already raised, that same amused superiority on his face. The look of a man who fully expected this to end in his son’s favor and wanted documentation of it.
I looked down at the gloves, then back up at Tyler. “Are you sure?” I asked him, calm, even the exact tone I’d have used briefing a room of colonels twice his age about an operation that carried real risk. Something flickered across his face. That same half-second hesitation I’d caught weeks earlier in the street, quickly buried under bravado.
