Chapter 12 #2
“Don’t.” She cut me off, but she was almost smiling.
“Don’t ‘shorty’ me. It’s no way. No way in hell you forgot who the hell I am.
Are you for real? You gone look at me and tell me that I ain’t shit, without actually saying it?
” She cocked her head to the side and looked in my face long for an answer.
“I’m not in the business of pretending,” I said flat. “Right now, tonight especially, I don’t have the patience for games. I don’t know what you think you know about me or how you know my name, but—”
“Because I’m your wife. Hell, I’m supposed to be anyway.” She blurted and I knew for sure this hoe was crazy. Thankfully I hadn’t sipped that damn drink yet.
The bar kept going. Music still playing, people still talking, glasses still hitting the counter. But something in my chest went completely still.
I stared at her.
And then it happened — like a door in the back of my memory swinging open all at once. A younger face underneath this one. Laughter I hadn’t heard in years. A name I hadn’t let myself say out loud in longer than I could count.
“Ivy.”
Her smile broke open slow, and something about it cracked me in a place I didn’t know was still there. This girl really had just made my heart skip. Was this really her after all these years?
Ivy. My Ivy. She was my childhood love. The girl I thought I’d buried in the same part of my past where I kept everything I’d lost. Standing right in front of me in a bar ten minutes from my house, and hours away from where we grew up.
She was looking like life had been doing her nothing but favors, buying me drinks like no time had passed at all.
But it did. She wasn’t at all a kid anymore.
She had grown into a beautiful ass woman. For real.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or walk out. what was this supposed to mean? Why the fuck would I run into her today of all days.
—
I sat there looking at her for a long moment, just studying her face like I was trying to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.
I had to be sure. Because the last thing I needed tonight, after everything I’d just been through, was to be sitting up in a bar losing my damn mind on top of it all.
But it was her. It was really her sitting right beside me.
Ivy.
I scrunched my face up without even meaning to, just running through it all in my head.
How was she sitting here right now? All I could picture was the way that she used to look when we were young, the prettiest girl I had seen, and she looked even better now.
She always had something to say and wasn’t scared to say it.
She wanted to keep up with the boys so my brothers hated her ass.
Always smelling like whatever her grandmother or parents had been cooking.
Always laughing. I used to live for that laugh.
And now here she was, sitting right beside me looking like God had taken his time with her since the last time I saw her.
Whatever she had been doing with herself in adulthood, it was working. She was thick in a way that made you pay attention to her. She had filled out like a woman was supposed to, and her face had matured into something that genuinely had no business being this close to me right now.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
Not at her. Just at the whole thing. The absurdity of this night. I’d been tied to a chair less than five hours ago, and now my childhood love was sitting next to me in a Dallas bar looking like that.
“What’s funny?” she asked, but she was smiling too.
“Nothing.” I shook my head. “Everything.”
She watched me for a second then her expression shifted into something a little more serious, but still soft.
“Why didn’t you ever come back and find me?
You promised me you were going to marry me.
By now, I thought your ass was either dead or in jail.
I really believed you had a good ass reason for not keeping your word. ”
I looked at her. Her ass was sitting in this bar tripping. Could she have been serious?
“Ivy.”
“Don’t Ivy me. You promised. So now I know you just a lying ass nigga. You looking good as fuck for yourself though Griz.” She barked, just loud enough for us to hear. I knew damn well she wasn’t stressing a childhood promise.
“You know what kind of family I come from,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“You know how we lived. That life I was born into wasn’t something I was ever going to be able to just walk away from clean enough to bring somebody like you into it.
It wasn’t realistic. I missed the fuck out of you for a long time, but I had to force myself to let you go.
It just would have drove a nigga crazy if I didn’t.
Besides, we were kids, and I thought that it wouldn’t take you long at all to forget me.
I remembered you for so long, because you were peace when I was living in hell. I’m sure you didn’t even know that.”
“I didn’t ask you to be realistic. All I knew was even at that young age, you loved and protected me.
You didn’t let the boys bully me, you always looked out for me and you taught me so much.
When you left, that shit broke me. Yeah we were kids, but you was my first lil puppy love, man. ” She laughed at that last statement.
“I know.” I turned the glass in my hand slow. “But I wasn’t built to be no lover ass nigga. I would’ve hurt you. Just a matter of time. Same as I will now.”
She didn’t say anything right away. Just looked at me with those eyes that always saw too much, then turned back toward the bar and said under her breath, quiet enough that I almost didn’t catch it, “We’ll see.”
I heard it though.
I let it sit there and didn’t touch on it. She just didn’t know that I would turn her whole world upside down. I wasn’t the kind of nigga that she wanted to play with.
“What are you doing in Dallas?” I asked, moving past it.
She crossed her legs and settled into the stool like she had all the time in the world.
“I moved here about six years ago. I got tired of living country, tired of watching everybody around me settle for the same nothing we grew up with. I just wanted more than that.”
“And you got it?”
She smiled, and it was different from before.
It was the smile of somebody who had gone out and built something and knew it.
“I own a bail bonds company. Two locations around DFW. And a tax company with offices in Shreveport, Houston, and the main location here in Dallas. Multiple streams of income, and I was a self-made millionaire my second year in business, so yeah. I do alright,” she boasted.
I looked at her for a second, then nodded slow. “Okay then Boss lady.” Then I cracked a smile.
“Don’t act surprised.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said, and I meant it. “You always had more sense than everybody around you. I’m proud of you. Real talk. You went and got it.”
Something in her face softened at that, just briefly, before she pulled it back together.
We stayed at that bar for a while after that.
Ordered more drinks, passed conversation back and forth like no time had gone anywhere.
She told me about her people back home, who had gotten married, who had kids, who was still doing the same thing they were doing as teenagers.
She laughed telling me about her brother getting locked up over something stupid, and I laughed with her because some things never changed no matter where you came from.
Then she asked about my family.
I felt it coming before she even finished the sentence.
And when she asked, I picked up my glass and took a slow drink and just said, “All is well.” Left it right there.
Didn’t elaborate, didn’t add anything to it.
She looked at me like she knew I was leaving something out, but she was smart enough not to push.
She saw how fucked up my family was back then, so she knew things are only worse now.
There was no way that tonight I was going to sit here and tell this woman that my father was in the ground, that my mother had lost herself so completely she didn’t even recognize her own name half the time, and that both my brothers had just become my enemies.
I wasn’t built for that kind of conversation. Not with her. Not with anybody.
She reached over and put her hand on top of mine on the bar.
“I can’t believe you’re really sitting here,” she said quietly. “I only ever see you in my dreams.”
I looked down at her hand, then back up at her face. Something moved through my chest that I didn’t have a name for and didn’t want to think about.
“What kind of dreams yo ass be having about me?” I asked, and my voice came out lower than I intended, with something behind it that I hadn’t planned on putting there. I was damn near flirting with her ass. The liquor had kicked in.
She looked at me for a second, held it, then said, “Use your imagination.”
That was it. That was all she said.
And my body responded before my brain could talk it out of it.
I knew like hell she’d seen my dick rise in my pants.
Just off a conversation. I felt it happen and I wasn’t even embarrassed about it, that’s how far gone I already was just sitting next to her.
She looked down at my jeans and when she looked back up she dragged her bottom lip slow between her teeth and didn’t say a word.
And right then I caught myself. Her biting her lips was making me want to see what her mouth did.
I pulled back mentally and felt the irritation rise up in my chest, but it was directed inward.
Because I knew this feeling. I’d been here before.
Different woman, different city, and I’d let myself get pulled in the same exact way.
By a pretty damn face. Tonight I was realizing that I was the kind of nigga that would always let a woman be my distraction.
Why was I thinking like this, when I had so much shit on my plate to handle.