Chapter 13
She took a pull from the blunt and looked at me sideways while she held the smoke in. Then she let it out slow and said, “So you followed in your father’s footsteps? You into the same shit that he was?”
I didn’t answer right away. Hell, I didn’t know how to answer that because the truth was although I didn’t follow him exactly, I was still in this world.
“I thought you wanted better than that,” she continued. “You used to tell me all the time that you’d be nothing like that nigga. Ever.” She passed the blunt back and shifted on the bed, getting comfortable like this was a conversation she’d been waiting to have for a while.
“You know after y’all moved, your father was the talk of the town for a long time.
And not in a good way. He got your uncle Gary’s house shot up.
Right next door to my family, Griz. A bullet went through my grandmother’s living room window.
We had to move behind that man’s bullshit.
Robbing the same people he was supposed to be giving product to.
” She shook her head. “I didn’t understand all of it when it was happening.
I was young. But when I got older and pieced it together, it made sense.
All I ever hoped was that you got out and did something different with yourself.
I always hated how your bitch ass daddy treated y’all. ”
I sat with that for a second. Let it move through me without reacting to it.
She wasn’t wrong about my father. The man was reckless in ways that cost people around him everything, and he never lost a night of sleep behind it.
I’d watched him operate my whole childhood and made a decision early that I was never going to be that.
What I had become was a different conversation entirely, but I wasn’t my father. That much I knew.
“I took a different path,” I said finally, passing the blunt back. “Got into other things. Business ventures. I been out the family business for a long time now.”
She nodded like she was deciding whether to believe me or just accept it.
I looked at her. “You came here to talk or do you on something else?” I asked, in all seriousness. I needed my stress relieved, I didn’t need her adding to it.
She looked back at me and the shift was immediate. Whatever reflection was sitting in her eyes a second ago dissolved into something slower, something that moved through the room differently. She didn’t say a word. Just looked at me and said, “Sit down.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, blunt still between my fingers, and watched her.
She slid off the bed onto her knees in front of me like it was the most natural thing in the world. No performance, no production. Just moved like she already knew what she was doing and had thought about doing it for a long time now.
She looked up at me once, then her hands went to my pants and she had them open before I even fully registered it happening.
She pulled my dick out and just looked for a second. Took her time examining my shit while her mouth watered. Then she wrapped her mouth around me and I felt everything in my body shift downward at once. She started off slowly kissing my head before taking it fully into her mouth.
She wasn’t playing. She knew exactly what she was doing and she did it without apology, slobbering and twisting her hands at the same time, taking me so deep I felt the back of her throat and had to clench my jaw to keep from making a sound I wasn’t ready to make.
A moan pushed out anyway, low and involuntary, and I had to press my fist to my mouth.
This muthafucka was working like she was trying to earn a raise at her job or some shit.
I grabbed the back of her head and pushed my dick deeper down her throat, slow at first then less slow, until I felt it building fast and hard and I had to make myself stop before I finished before I was ready.
I pushed her head back gently and stood up. Reached into my pants to grab my wallet and pulled out the condom I kept tucked behind everything else.
I looked at the wrapper.
Expired. A month ago.
Ivy looked up from the floor and saw my face, then looked at the condom, and laughed. Like actually laughed, not politely either.
“Is that dust on it?” She covered her mouth. “Griz. How long has it been?”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m just asking—”
“I said don’t start. But shit, I know it’s been over three years. I been focused and ain’t had time for distractions.”
She was still laughing until she saw that I was serious. Then, she told me how she admired a man with self control. She went to her purse, then came back and put a strip of condoms in my hand. I looked at them, then looked at her.
“Why do you have a whole pharmacy of rubbers in your purse?”
“I volunteer at a youth center,” she said, matter of fact, already sitting back on the bed.
“Big sister program. I keep them on hand so that I can refill the buckets when I visit the center for my high school girls. Always restock just in case. I don’t condone them having sex, but I know that shit happens.
.” She reached over and unzipped her bag and tilted it toward me and I looked inside.
Boxes. Multiple.
I couldn’t argue with that. The story tracked. As many boxes of condoms that she had, she was either a prostitute, fucking at least 100 niggas a night, or her story that she just told me was true. I chose to believe her story.
I tore one open and wasted no time putting it on. Then I looked at her still sitting there in that dress like she was waiting on something.
“Take that off,” I said. “Come here.” I demanded.
She stood up and held my eyes the whole time she undressed.
Didn’t rush, didn’t look away, just peeled that dress off her body slow while looking directly at me like she was watching for a reaction.
I pulled my shirt over my head and stood up out of my pants and we just looked at each other for a second in the quiet.
She had a body that didn’t make sense for how calm she was about it.
“You gotta eat it first. Ain’t no way you finna stick that big ass dick in me without preparing me first.”
I didn’t have a single argument in me. I licked my lips, laid back on the bed, and told her to come sit on my face.
She didn’t hesitate. Walked right over, climbed up, and straddled me with her thighs pressing into my shoulders as she made her way up, and I pulled her all the way down and went to work like I had something to prove.
And she tasted good. Not just good. The kind of good that made a nigga embarrass himself if he wasn’t careful.
I felt her start to grind and I palmed both her cheeks and pulled her deeper because I wasn’t done.
I wanted all of it. I felt her cream and it only got sweeter and I held on like I was trying to stay under water by choice.
I let her cum all over my face multiple times and I just slurped that shit up.
The way that she moan was sexy as hell and I wanted to spend all night hearing that shit.
After that we moved into each other so naturally it didn’t feel like the first time.
It felt like this had been my woman for years and we just matched each other energy too well.
We went back and forth, position to position, her on top of me at the edge of the bed with her chest against mine, arms locked around my neck while she bounced and I gripped her ass with both hands and met every movement.
It went on like that for a long time. Two hours, ten positions, neither one of us tapping out, until we were both tired as fuck and breathing hard as hell.
We’d went through two boxes of condoms and her ass had me tapped out.
We showered together and ended up going another round.
What the fuck was I doing? As good as she was fucking me, you couldn’t tell me that she wasn’t my woman.
After our shower, we went back out, got back on the bed, and she rolled another one while I laid there staring at the ceiling trying to remember the last time I’d been that gone off a person. Her sex was unmatched.
We talked after that. Real talking. I let her in a little, not all the way, but enough.
Told her things I didn’t usually say out loud.
She listened without interrupting, without making faces, just absorbed it and talked back like an adult.
It felt easy in a way that made me uncomfortable if I thought about it too hard so I didn’t.
I fell asleep holding her at some point without planning to. Ivy felt like the life I was supposed to have had.
—
When I woke up the next morning, the room had that quiet to it that felt different from sleep quiet. I already knew before I even moved.
I got up and checked the bathroom anyway looking for Ivy since she was no longer in bed with me. Door was open, light off, nobody in it. I brushed my teeth and threw my clothes on, then looked out the window.
Her truck was gone.
I stood there for a second just looking at the empty space in the lot where that pink Bronco had been sitting, and I felt something move through me that I didn’t want to call what it was, but I’ve felt this shit before.
I walked back to the main room and that’s when I saw it. Folded on the dresser.
A note.
I picked it up and read it. She wrote about how she hadn’t expected the night to go the way it did.
Said I was everything she ever dreamed of, and she meant that literally.
Said she wished the timing was different.
Said she hoped last night was exactly what we both needed, and that she wanted me to never forget her.
I stood there holding the paper for a second.
Then I crushed it in my fist.
Because I had been here before. Different woman. Different city. Same feeling in my chest when I woke up to nothing but a note and a memory. Cherish had done the exact same thing and look at what that had cost me. Look at where that had landed everybody