Moving in with Ramses Young was something Milan couldn't have pictured in a thousand, million years, but she'd been there a day so far and she had yet to have to mace him in the face for getting handsy with her.

He had a nice place.

Not an apartment which was surprising, but an actual house with three beds and two bathrooms. She really didn't have to see him if she didn't want to.

He delivered on that at least.

He could cook too. For her first night he'd made a kick-ass lasagna with spinach. Now all she had to worry about was him fattening her up and eating her like a witch.

It was around eight at night and Milan was just finishing up putting her clothes in the closet in her room when she heard a knock at her bedroom door.

Very polite for a man who broke into her car to try and get a date.

When she opened the door, of course it was Ramses. He was dressed in a white tee shirt and gray  Nike shorts, black Nike slides on his feet as well.

"I was wondering if you wanted to come out and watch Brown Sugar with me. Yo' lil ass used to be off crack watching this movie when we were younger so..."

Milan smiled fondly at the memory of her discovering the almost decades old movie now. She couldn't help it, she was a sucker for black love stories.

She nodded, leaning on the door as he looked at her. "Yeah, I'll be out. Thanks for inviting me." She joked a bit before closing her door again.

For some reason, she was giddy inside like he'd just asked her on a date.

Looking in the mirror that was attached to her door, she looked down at what she was wearing. A gray tank top and her old navy blue high school gym shorts that were way too tight now that she'd grew an ass ten fold the size of when she was running laps in them in school.

She had to remind herself that this was her home for now and she didn't need to look her best all the time for him.

They were roommates.

But even then, she couldn't help herself from pulling her hair down from her messy ponytail and brushing it out a few times before grabbing her phone and stepping out of her room, into the hallway.

Walking into where the living room connected with the kitchen, she saw Ramses was already comfortably on the couch on his phone. Definitely not into the movie that was on. She hadn't eaten in a minute so she went into the kitchen for a snack.

"You want anything from over here?" She asked him, and he looked up from his phone immediately.

Milan instantly got self conscious of her position, which was reaching into his cupboard to grab a bag of chips. His eyes ran down the length of her body slowly before answering.

"Nah, I'm good. Grab me a water though, please."

Nodding at that, Milan got her chips then grabbed him a water from the fridge like he asked before walking over and handing it to him. Sitting down with her chips, she sat in the crook of the couch where the arm rest met the back of it.

As she opened the bag up, she could feel Ramses eyes still on her. She looked up and made a face at him, "Is there a problem?" She asked to snap him out of his gaze. Ramses smiled.

"I'm just wondering why you stuffed your ass in that corner. You think I'mma bite you?" He smartly returned and Milan resisted the urge to throw the bag of chips on him.

He was lucky I was hungry.

She put one in her mouth, turning her face towards the TV and shrugged.

"I don't know. You look like you bite anyway."

Before she could even get into where the movie was at, Ramses snatched the bag of chips from her hand and held them over his head. "You can't eat my shit and get to calling me ugly, n*gga."

Milan groaned in frustration as she moved over to his side of the couch.

Slapping his upper arm a few times to try to weaken his hold, Milan was irritated that instead of dropping them, his arm shook with laughter. She moved back from him and glared, "I would've thought you'd grown out of being a bully." She chastised him as she kept her eyes solely on her dangling bag of chips.

Ramses scoffed at the small dig. "Grow outta bullying you? Never." He shot back at her as his arm seemed to grow even taller above their heads.

She knew exactly what he was trying to do. All men were the same at the core and the way she was moving in her tight tank top was not lost on her as she tried to grab the bag the firs time. He was totally gonna check her out while doing so.

Luckily, she grew up with an older brother.

With a quick elbow to his stomach, Milan caused the man to buckle and groan; giving her the perfect chance to grab the chips from him and huddle back into the corner she was in at first.

Watching him doubled over in pain was as sweet a victory as biting into one of the Doritos she was eating.

"Yo ass extra as hell for hitting me. But I'd go to jail if I did the same thing to you right?" Ramses hoarsely recovered, righting himself on the couch so he was facing the TV. Milan softly laughed and nodded.

"Hell yeah."

Ramses just smacked his lips at her unbothered attitude with his pain.

The part of the movie, Brown Sugar, that was playing was close to the end. When the two main characters were at a dinner party, the man already married and the woman already been proposed to. Still, the chemistry between them was crackling. It was painful for the man to see his childhood sweetheart moving on... especially with another man.

"Man... if it was my shorty who just got proposed to, best believe I'm snatching the ring off her finger. Ain't nothing stopping me." Ramses commented aloud, which caused Milan to give a humorous grunt.

"He got his own woman to take care of. He's being selfish. Of course you'd agree." She shot back at him without taking her eyes off of the screen.

Milan could just feel Ramses rolling his eyes at her comment.

"She know what they had going on! She's bogus for not giving him a little more time to get out of his situation. They're definitely home team."

"You think that lil childhood friendship makes them for lifers? Mans is married, Ramses. Ain't no situation." Milan hotly clarified.

She wasn't surprised Ramses was rooting for the man on the screen, he'd literally just tried to get her to wait out his past relationship.

He went quiet for a second, but Milan paid him no mind. That was until she felt his body heat seeping into her thigh. Her head whipped around to see him not even a finger's length apart from her on the couch.

"Good thing I wasn't married, huh?"

His breath tickled the hair on the back of her neck. Chills spread out over Milan's body because of the proximity.

In a rush to cool off the quickly rising temperature between them, Milan smashed the bag of chips on his face. The bright red bag immediately saving her from looking upon his face.

"You might as well be still. You tryna rebound me?" She asked him incredulously.

"Maaan!" Ramses's muffled voice came from under the bag which made it vibrate against Milan's palm before he snatched it away from her and threw it away from them. He immediately resumed his close position to her face now that her weapon was gone.

"Ain't nobody tryna do shit to you, Mi. I broke up with Tati because it was never gon' work. Not after I got back up with you." Ramses revealed with frustration. Moving away from her a bit now, which Milan kind of felt bad for. Not too much though.

Milan was surprised by his revelation. She knew she was putting pressure on him, but she also knew Ramses was not a man who'd bend to anyone's will if it wasn't in his best interest.

"What do you mean? You been with that girl since high school. It obviously was going somewhere." She reminded him, more like reminding herself not to be to excited by his emotionally charged words.

Ramses looked at her, the blue light of the TV doing wonders for his dark brown skin. It looked as if he was glowing for a second, and his eyes were disarming. The hazel depths only accented in the dark lighting.

"I ain't gon' leave anything if there's more for me there. Once I laid my eyes on you Mi, in that club, even before the shooting, I was over Tati."

"Naw, I ain't know you were gon' have me waiting outside your house to see you and shit, but I ain't never had something so clear to me smack me across my face." He explained seriously, almost like he was replaying the night they met again in his head while he looked at her.

Milan was not too taken by his statement. She knew Ramses was good with his words. That's why he won 'Most Likely to be President' in his class yearbook.

The man could talk his way out of hell.

"What smacked you across the face, Ramses? That we're for lifers? Please." Milan brushed him off. Turning her face back towards the screen.

Ramses caught her jaw before she could even get there, softly turning her face back to his. Once again she was damn near entranced by his gaze.

"I knew there was more for me with you..."

Ramses began and Milan was about to turn her face again because she'd had enough with his pretty little one-liners, but he kept her face steadfast in his palm.

"I always gotta break shit down with you." He laughed, there was a vacantness to it. He definitely was preparing to lay something heavy to rest.

He was not wrong though. With the life they were accustomed to black and white information was the only thing you could trust. Any fluff could get you killed.

Black and white reasoning was what made Devon send her that stupid ass warning.

Black and white reasoning is what killed DeMarco.

"Me and Tati, yeah we were together for what? Five years? That shit is long, but the relationship had been cooled down. She been with me from the jump and as annoying as she is, she's good people. I ain't wanna just ditch her because the years behind us seemed better than the years to come."

"But once I saw you and kept thinking about you, there were no more years to come with us no more."

Milan heard what he was saying, but he was not making himself sound like a stable candidate for anything right now. He saw something better and he ditched what he had.

How long would I be something better?

"I appreciate you telling me this. I do, but Ramses we just reconnected. We are so different from when you used to hang around with my brother. You could've just made the biggest mistake of your life breaking up with that girl. You don't care about that?" Milan tried her best to bring him back to the present of what they were.

Not the past of him and Tatiana. Nor the future of what he planned for them if they got together.

Big if too.

Ramses bit his lip, inhaling deeply before resuming to look at her. He dropped his hand from her face and put it in his lap. He regarded her like it was taking everything in him not to just grab her and shake her.

"I ain't say I ain't care about me and T's history. Shit, I just said we spent five years together! That means a lot to me. What I'm tryna get in your fat ass head, is that leaving five years ain't little shit to me and if I ain't think you were worth it, I would've left your ass alone. Yeah, you fine as hell but fine is a dime a dozen in the hood. Plenty of pieces of candy for me and the bro's if I wanted them,"

Milan wrinkled her nose at the metaphor, but she stayed quiet.

"You ain't Devon's kid sister no more and I definitely ain't the lil n*gga who was his best friend."

"I been seeing you in my mind since the night I woke up and you were laying on top of me holding my fucking heart in my body, Mi. I been seeing you just like that and I wanna see you more. You, right now."

"I don't give a fuck about anybody else or what ever else your big ass head gon' think of because you finna piss me off."

Her stomach dropped at the mention of her in the ambulance while he was seemingly unconscious.

The fact that he wasn't and he remembered that very moment made her knees weak. Paired with the way his eyes were boring through her very soul, she had the overwhelming urge to just collapse into him.

She knew this was bound to happen, but she didn't know how fast.

She was used to boys cowering when she told them to show their hands when it came to what they planned for their relationship and how they truly felt about her.

She was used to being left out in the cold, whether it be from her parents dying way before they were supposed to or how her brother had yet to apologize for his hit and bring her back home.

But here Ramses was, almost begging her to let her guard down to see them, to see him as he was right now with all the gang business out the window.

It completely shattered her already faulty resolve against him and his hazel brown eyes.

The one thing that came to mind to ground herself and her heart was to kiss him.

And she did, she practically pounced him making him fall back onto the arm rest of the couch on his side. When their lips met it was if the whole world went dark, his arms wrapping around her waist like he intended her to melt into him.

God, she wished she would.

Their tongues met in a way that seemed as if it was practiced a hundred times before. His mouth coaxing her closer into his arms, the heat from his chest seeping into hers.

It was when she felt his hands caress the arch of her back and dive lower did she pull away. A kiss swollen and dazed mess, but putting the much needed space between them to make sure they didn't go any farther.

Ramses rose up from the couch's arm with a smug smile on his face, the light from the TV glinting off of his white teeth. He wiped his mouth with his forearm before looking over at her with low, hooded eyes.

"Was that your way of showing me you believe me now?"

He broke the thick silence between them.

Milan was still feeling every bit of hot and heavy, as she side eyed him before rolling her eyes.

She got up from the couch, looking at the TV she saw the two main characters right in the throes of their climatic sex scene.

How fitting.

She thought, but seized the moment to get under Ramses's skin instead.

"That—" Milan started, pointing at the screen where the actors were now dreamily screwing their brains out, "—Will never be us." She told him, which only made Ramses smile brighter.

"Aye, tell that to my mans down here?" He called to her, childishly slow stroking one of the pillows on the couch while biting his lip. Milan's jaw dropped before she huffed in disgust.

"You're a fucking kid!" She screamed as she retreated back to her room a flustered mess.

Slamming the door, she threw herself onto the bed. The cool duvet losing in its battle to cool her heated skin.

Only day one and he's already gotten to second base.

Home team it is.