Just Once

They could love anybody. They just can't love each other right.

Zaria "Zae" Coleman built everything she has with her own two hands — a soul-food kitchen grinding toward a real restaurant, and a wall around her heart high enough to keep every man who ever hurt her on the other side of it. She learned young, watching her mama shrink for men who always left, that the only way to never get left is to leave first. So she tests. She keeps receipts. She'd rather be right than be held.

Malik "Leek" Devereaux came up in the streets and got out clean, flipping the block into a recording studio and a shot at a name. He'll give a woman the world in cash and a locked door for a heart, because the men in his life taught him that love and a fist can live in the same hand — and he swore he'd never be that. He loves the only way he knows how: with everything, and out loud never.

When Leek speaks first to Zae one 4 a.m. in a gold-lit window, two people built from the same broken pieces — cut the exact opposite way — fall into something neither of them knows how to keep. What follows is a love story with the volume all the way up: the grind, the makeups, the breakups, a young girl they both come to love like their own, and the ghosts of everybody who wrecked them before, waiting at the edges for their moment.

Pride does what pride does. And when Zae goes looking for greener grass, she hands a stranger the map to her own heart — only to learn too late that the man she trashed to leave is the one who'd never hurt her, and the man she left him for is the one who will.

Set in Atlanta's realest corners and written in a voice you can hear out loud, JUST ONCE is a raw, tender, gut-punch of a novel about trauma, trust, and the people we love too hard and too late.

It asks the only question that ever mattered: can two people who love each other this much finally learn how — before it's too late?

Some doors don't open in time.