Chapter 16 #3
I grabbed my phone off the bar as I moved behind him to lock the door. When he was gone, my first call was a FaceTime request to Karsyn. I hadn’t really heard from her today, which meant she was pretty busy or on that selectively mute stuff.
She answered the FaceTime on the second ring. I immediately noted she was in the car.
“Hello, handsome, how are you?” she greeted me.
“Tryna figure out why I’ve only heard from you once today and that was you telling me you’d be at the studio later tonight.”
“Honestly I was swamped, I’m sorry. Where are you?”
“How close are you to the house?”
“Not even, just pulled off from the pizzeria.” She looked everywhere but at the camera, adjusting mirrors and things like she wasn’t the only person who drove her car.
“I’m about to send you a location. Meet me here. I wanna show you something.” I went into our text messages and sent her the address to the restaurant.
“Show me what?”
“Something. Are you coming or what, baby?”
She giggled into the phone. “You know I’m coming. Junior’s beef is gonna be col—”
“And he can warm that motherfucker up,” I responded quickly, interrupting her statement.
There she was laughing again.
Everything about Karsyn calmed my nervous system.
Her laugh, especially the pitch and the way she nearly lost her balance because even though something wasn’t that funny she over laughed.
Her joy because it always spilled from the seams of her soul and beamed from every part of her…
At this point she was my nervous system.
“You’re a mess. How was your day, though?”
“Productive as fuck. I’m ready for a hot shower and to fall asleep with my hand in your shirt. And I also talked to Jayson. They’ll be there at the end of the week to work on your closet.”
“Okay. Then why not meet me at you—home?”
“Because I’m like Martin right now, baby. I have a dream and I need to talk to you about it.”
“Okay, I’m coming.” She giggled while I heard her turn signal come on.
“I talked to Carla today. She’s staying in Florida and Junior has made it clear that he isn’t moving there. She wants me to talk him into coming to see her on breaks and during vacations from school.”
“That seems fair.”
For the duration of her drive we talked, me briefly discussing Carla and Junior while she talked about work. Apparently she’d gotten an order for a custom wedding dress because someone had seen images of hers on social media.
When she pulled up, I met her outside. She parked right in front of my truck. I opened her door, then went around and grabbed the pizza from the passenger side, leaving Junior’s beef on the seat. “What’s in this brown bag?”
“My salad.”
I frowned. “The fuck you get that for. Don’t be thinking you’re about to starve my baby, eating only leaves.”
She laughed. “When you broke up with me, I sat in my bed in my mother’s house and ate Cheeto puffs for days, if not weeks. It was so bad that there were Cheeto puffs in my fucking hair. I really need to eat salads.”
I didn’t respond. She was gonna eat some of this pizza, even if I had to feed it to her.
“And where are we?” She stood in the center of the elevated part of the dining floor near the bar, stealing all my attention from the pizza I had just set down.
“Yo, that’s how you leave the house, Syn?” She had on a pair of brown stretch pants and the matching full zip sweater. It wasn’t zipped up fully, which exposed a cropped tank top underneath. It hugged her frame in all the right places.
She glanced down at what she was wearing and frowned. “It’s not bad. Just something to be comfortable in.”
“Comfortable enough to get fucked up,” I mumbled, going toward the back to get two stools. We’d moved them to the back earlier so they weren’t in the way.
“So are you gonna tell me where we are?”
“We’re in one of my dreams. I wanna open a restaurant. I’m gonna open this restaurant. I don’t wanna cook in it or anything like that. But I wanna own it. I wanna be more than just another nigga from Watertown with too many dirty ties than clean.”
She smiled and approached me. Her hands landed on both sides of my face, caressing my beard. “Oh baby, you are so much more, even before you open this restaurant. I’m so proud of you. How long have you been working on this?”
“Couple months.”
“I’m really proud of you.”
“Ain’t open yet, baby.” I lowered my head and pecked her awaiting lips. When we parted, I had her eyes, and something in them calmed my core. Even with everything, she looked at me like I was that nigga, like I was the only star she needed in her sky.
“But it will be and I know whose fucking the owner.” She did a little dance, gyrating her hips against me.
I laughed and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her as close as possible. “You do, huh?”
“Mhmm, and for the right price, I might be willing to buss a few tables if needed.”
“I’ma keep that in mind, but let’s go ahead and eat before I end up busting something else.”
She giggled and we moved to eat. While she pulled sanitizer from her purse, I grabbed the napkins and things I had here. When I was seated next to her, she extended the hand sanitizer to squirt in my hands.
I accepted, rubbing my hands together while she opened that funky ass salad and the pizza box. For a moment we ate in silence, just enjoying the presence of one another, but then she peeped me feeding her pizza while she tried to eat her salad. I ate pizza too, but I made sure she took a few bites.
“Psy, I got my salad to eat.”
“Yeah and the pizza too, right?” I held a piece to her lips, waiting for her to accept.
“You are such a freaking bully.”
“Maybe.”