Jonah （Jones） Sumners
My cousins Lex, Uzziah, the chick on the back of my bike, and I ended up at Waterfalls. She probably thought she was going to my house, but the joke was on her. I didn’t even have a house. Not really. I was currently staying in my RV.
I didn’t plan for that to be my permanent circumstance.
I was working and saving with intentions of purchasing a plot of land somewhere.
First, I had to decide where I wanted to settle down.
I just hadn’t figured out where that somewhere would be.
But when I found it, I would have enough in the bank to purchase a piece of land and start building my house.
At almost thirty-five, I knew I was getting a late start.
Late as hell, actually. There were kids in their twenties that were way ahead of me in the game of life.
There was nothing I could do about the fact that I had fucked around in my twenties—more interested in chasing excitement and pussy than setting and achieving goals.
I moved from gig to gig, place to place, and woman to woman with absolutely no regard for my future.
I kind of never planned to have one with the way I kept flirting with illegal activities.
For most of my twenties, I expected to spend the rest of my twenties behind bars, but I managed to avoid that outcome.
Now I was in Oregon. It was the fifteenth state I’d called home.
Maybe it would be the last. I had finally started to get my shit together.
I worked for my cousin, Bright, on his construction crew.
I’d been in Jackson Falls, Oregon, for two months, and Bright had kept me busy, kept me working, and kept me making money. I liked it.
The town was just so fucking slow, though.
There wasn’t a lot to do, and that wasn’t good for a person like me.
I was the very definition of the saying, idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
The minute I got bored, I started searching for trouble.
But I was trying to be a different me—a more grown-up, mature me.
There had to be something interesting to do in the area that didn’t involve me putting myself in a bad situation.
So far, I’d been filling my idle time with women.
That shit was unsustainable. Not because I couldn’t get women, but because the last thing I was trying to do was have all the small-town residents looking at me sideways because I was running through their precious daughters.
Besides, at a few months shy of thirty-five, it was whack as hell for me to still be looking for entertainment between some woman’s legs.
But even as I had those thoughts, I was forced to look at the back of the woman I was wasting time with at the moment.
She was leading us to a small table front and center of the dance floor.
Both of us knew that there would be line dancing on the dance floor, so it was clear to me that she wanted to be seen.
I walked past that table, toward one closer to the back wall where Lex and Uzziah were seated, not really caring if she followed or not. I came to get a drink and hang with my cousins for a minute, not be seen. I sat down at the table next to my cousins with my back against the exposed brick wall.
She came over and sat across from me with a pout on her full lips. “Why we sitting in the corner like we’re on punishment?”
“You can sit wherever you wanna sit, sweetheart. This is where I’m sitting.”
“Why are we sitting here, anyway?” She batted her dark eyes at me. “We could be at your place, and I could be sitting on your dick instead.”
I chuckled lightly. “We could do that, but honestly, I’m drained. I spent the entire day with a chick named Kylena from Chinook Woods. She fucked me and sucked me all afternoon. I’m literally bone fucking dry.”
Her facial features arranged themselves into a frown as she stood up from the table. “I see my friends.”
“Take care.” I smirked at her.
She threw up her middle finger before putting a twitch in her hips and prancing away with a, “Fuck you.”
I had to laugh. My eyes followed her as she joined the girls she’d been with at the football game.
My eyes lingered on the pretty, curvy one I’d seen at Lex’s barbershop.
I’d wanted to ask about her then, but Kylena had been all in my face.
“Who’s ol’ girl in the jean jacket? The one who came through the shop earlier today? ”
Lex followed my eyeline. “Oh. That’s Church.”
“Church?” I repeated, not sure I heard him right. “That her last name or her first name?”
“Her first name.”
I screwed up my face. I knew that black moms had the tendency to get creative when naming their children, but to name a girl child Church? I didn’t get it.
Lex kept talking. “You met Bright’s wife, right?”
I nodded. “Bailey? Yeah. She’s cool.”
“Church is her little sister.”
“Get the fuck outta here.”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t hold ya. They got the same mom. Alisha. She’s married to Bayliss. And she got another sister that’s married to Beckham.”
My mind was sufficiently fucked up by that news. She had a mama and some sisters who were married to cousins of mine? Okay. “Why she come by the shop today? What was she dropping off?”
“Oh.” Lex smirked. “Her little, young ass is getting into her entrepreneurial bag. She bought a house with some apple trees on the property. Now most people would’ve thought to make pies or something. But nah. Church decided to use the apples to make hair care products.”
That was a coincidence because our family, the Sumners, had founded a hair care dynasty.
Our family was the largest, most successful black hair care company in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and the Mid-West until my grandfather sold the brand to a big corporation fifteen years earlier when natural hair came back in style.
Lex kept talking. “She makes a beard oil that almost all the shop customers swear by. I can’t keep the shit in stock, no matter how many bottles I buy from her.”
I nodded slowly. “Good for lil’ mama. She’s like a real businesswoman.”
Uzziah laughed at that. “She is . . . with her little fine ass.”
“She’s fine as hell. If she wasn’t so damn young, I woulda been tried it,” Lex admitted.
“How young is young? I ain’t as old as your old ass,” Uzziah joked.
“Shut your married ass up,” Lex told him.
“For real. How old is she?”
“Maybe twenty-five.”
“Shit, her brain fully developed.” Uzziah gave a smirk.
“And so is Paisley’s. You trying to have your wife on a murder charge?”
“Absolutely not,” Uzziah agreed. “Drop the subject.”
Shit. I was thirty-four. At twenty-five, she was probably too young for me, too. Besides, she’d seen me on my bullshit, . . . twice. Uzziah was right. We needed to drop the subject.