There’s something mythic about a “bad boy.”
Good girls don’t just like them.
We idolize them.

The edge.
The danger.
The confidence that feels unbothered.

And somewhere deep down, the quiet fantasy:
Maybe I’ll be the one he changes for.

One day I posted asking for prayers — Perry, my first son’s father had a heart attack. Within minutes, Paul was in my inbox.

“How do you know Perry?”

“That’s my baby daddy,” I replied.

His next message felt like fate tapping me on the shoulder.

“His sister, Bree is my baby mama.”

I just stared at my phone like,
What in the Maury Povich ancestral entanglement is this?

We laughed about how small the world was. A small-world coincidence. A mutual connection. A comment under a post. The kind of digital overlap that happens every day and disappears just as quickly.

Except this one didn’t.

We laughed first. About how small the world was. About who knew who. About how somehow our paths had almost crossed before but never quite touched.

That first message turned into another. Then another. Soon we weren’t just commenting — we were inboxing. Then Face Timing. Then staying up past midnight like sleep was optional.

Every morning, like clockwork, I’d wake up to a new video.

Him in his kitchen, shirtless and goofy, dancing to 90s R&B. Lip-syncing Jodeci. Spinning a dish towel like it was a microphone. Performing, but casually. Like he wasn’t trying.

It was charm.
It was effort.
It was intentional.

And attention from a man like him?

That hits different.

He wasn’t subtle. He was handsome in a way that felt curated — gym-built, camera-aware, confident. The kind of man who already knew he had options. So when he chose to focus on me, it felt like elevation.

I kept it real early.

“I’ve seen your page,” I told him. “You look like a player. I want peace. Marriage. Not games.”

That should have slowed him down.

It didn’t.

He leaned in.

“Give me a chance, Malia. You don’t know what kind of man I can be when I’m really in love.”

That line did something to me.

He said he was in recovery too. Said he’d been through addiction. Chaos. Darkness. Said he understood what it meant to rebuild. Said he was clean now. Ready. Done playing.

And I am a sucker for a redemption story.

Add two people who have survived addiction, and you don’t just get chemistry — you get intimacy on fast-forward.

Within weeks, we were falling in love over the phone..

Excerpt From When Idols Fall