The Round 3 email came in at 7:14 a.m.
I read it half-awake. Love. The topic was love. I put my phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling for a minute, then picked it back up and read it again like the topic might have changed.
It hadn't.
I lay there thinking about it. Love was trickier than the other topics not because I didn't have anything to say but because everybody had something to say about it and most of it sounded the same. The safe version was a relationship song, something with a hook that made people feel good about themselves. But that wasn't what won rounds. I knew I wanted to sing for this one. I'd been sitting on that idea since Round 2 something about switching it up, showing range, not just rapping every time.
I'd figure out the song later. Right now I texted Cassie.
you free today 8:02 AM
Cassie yes why 👀 8:04 AM
pick you up at 11 8:05 AM
Cassie ok 🙂 8:06 AM
* * *
I took the Charger.
Cassie came out in jeans and a white top, hair down, looking like she always looked like she was trying a little but not enough that you could call her on it. She got in and smiled at me and I thought, briefly, about what the baggage situation actually was. Nate. The whole Nate thing. The way that whole story had a weight to it that sometimes just sat in the car with us even when we weren't talking about it.
I didn't bring it up. Neither did she.
We went bowling. She was bad at it and leaned into being bad at it, which I respected — she wasn't pretending to be worse than she was, she was genuinely just not coordinated and found it funny. I beat her by sixty points in the first game and she demanded a rematch and lost by more. She said the lane was uneven. I told her all the lanes were the same. She said mine was easier. I let her have it.
We ate after. She talked mostly. She had a way of talking where she moved through things fast surface to surface and never quite landed on anything for too long. I listened and responded and it was easy. Cassie was easy. That was the honest thing about her: she didn't require anything complicated from me.
Which was also the thing that made me not sure about her. But I kept that to myself.
I dropped her off at three. She touched my arm when she said bye. I drove home thinking about the song.
* * *
I had twenty thousand new subscribers.
I'd checked after Round 2 went up and then tried not to check again and failed. Twenty thousand. The number didn't feel real yet it sat in my head like something from someone else's life that I was just borrowing until the actual owner came back for it. I'd gained most of them in the forty-eight hours after the battle posted. The comments were still going. People were tagging the channel in stuff, reposting the battle clip, asking when new music was dropping.
Even if I lost Round 3 it was worth it. I knew that already.
I sat at the desk and opened the laptop and started pulling love songs. Not to sample just to sit in. I needed to feel the shape of the thing before I could do anything with it. Marvin Gaye. Al Green. Stevie. Some newer stuff. I listened for about an hour with my eyes closed, not taking notes, just absorbing. The beat started forming somewhere in the back of my head the way they always did — a low thing, something slow, something that left space in it for a voice to move around.
Two days. I had two days.
I was halfway into building the progression when I got restless in a different way. I texted Savannah.
Need it. 6:48 PM
Savannah Sorry babe, not home 😔 6:51 PM
I put the phone down.
I lay back on the bed and thought about Kat, who was at some family thing tonight — her parents liked me, which was its own complicated thing — and I thought about Cassie, who came with the whole Nate situation still attached to her like something she couldn't put down yet. Neither option was simple. Neither option was available.
I was still lying there when Zen's text came in.
Zen Got a run. Package drop, 10 min out. Bring back what they give you. 7:03 PM
Zen 3k. 7:03 PM
I stared at the ceiling for a second.
Three thousand dollars. Ten-minute drive. Drop something off, bring something back.
I knew what bring something back meant. I'd learned not to ask exactly what the something was on these short runs that was the deal, that was always the deal, you moved the thing and you didn't catalog it and you didn't think about it too hard on the way home.
I sat up. Put on my jacket. Grabbed my keys.
The beat could wait an hour.
* * *
The drop was clean. In and out in nine minutes. The guy at the door didn't say anything except the address of where I was bringing the return package, and I nodded and didn't ask anything and drove.
On the way back to Zen's I had the windows down and Marvin Gaye on low and I thought about love songs. About what I was actually going to write. About whether love even made sense as a topic for someone who had what I had — Savannah when she felt like it, Cassie with her complications, Kat who was always a little bit somewhere else.
None of it was love exactly. I knew that.
But maybe that was the song. Maybe that was what I had to say about it.
I dropped the package at Zen's, collected the three thousand, and drove home.
I sat back down at the desk and opened the laptop.
The beat was still waiting.