Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
LOVIE
I don’t think I learned how to run from a man until I fell in love with AJ. Who else could’ve taught me how to sprint out of Rich’s house like a damn fool instead of apologizing for breaking his stuff like a civilized person would have?
“You sure everything was good at Rich’s today, right?” Aunt Faye stares at me from her seat across the kitchen table.
It’s the third time she’s asked me since she picked me up from his house. The second time she asked was in Ms. Vera’s guest bathroom while I plunged her toilet as hard as I could to clear the mound of toilet paper her cat had dumped inside it.
“Mhmm. I told you it was.” I hum back with a mouthful of bland leftover mashed potatoes.
It’s the only response I trust myself to say out loud about Rich and his house, because I can’t tear his face or his smell from my memory.
They’re both embedded in the fibers of my brain and now I’m stuck sitting under Aunt Faye’s gaze while I try to forget those muscles my eyes grazed over.
He’s not anything like Uncle Kenny hinted at—at least I don’t think he is.
I shift in my seat.
None of Uncle Kenny’s fighters have miraculously made him and Aunt Faye millionaires, so Uncle Kenny still works the graveyard shift at the pipe yard.
So that means it’s just me and Aunt Faye’s suspicious glances for the rest of the night, and lucky for me she detests eating in front of the TV when Uncle Kenny is gone, so the only thing she has to focus on is me.
“You told AJ you’re helping me clean while you visit? It’s just like the old days, huh?” she asks.
I stab my fork into my pork chop and nod.
“What’d he say? I bet he misses you up there in that big ol’ empty place y’all got.”
She’s only ever seen our “big ol’ empty place” on FaceTime.
I’d been begging AJ to buy their plane tickets since we moved in, but it was never “the right time” and every time they tried to buy their own tickets they accepted my “the apartment isn’t ready yet” excuse.
Eventually, they just stopped asking to come.
“He didn’t say much. It’s early season and you know how he gets with all the pressure. He doesn’t have a lot of time for anything right now, let alone my cleaning tales.”
Her stare burns the side of my face. “Well, that’s not like him. The AJ I know will sit and listen to you breathe on the phone for six hours—early season or not.”
My throat constricts.
She talks like she’s always loved AJ’s oddities when we both know better.
It’s all in her tone. But I still don’t know how to tell her I up and left without saying a word to him.
I don’t know how to claw through the block in my brain to blurt it out and then shut down all of her follow-up questions—like how, when, and why.
“Next time you get him on the phone, let me know,” she adds. “I wanna ask him something about the wedding.”
“‘Kay…”
“Smitty come by Rich’s?” she asks, leaning to the side in her chair and crossing her legs.
I shrug. “I don’t even know who that is.”
“That’s his neighbor,” she says between chews. “He came to your graduation party. He’s my classmate.”
She says all of this like I should know everything there is to know about Rich and the folks who hang out on Joliet when I’ve always been damn near banned from any street behind Lockwood.
I smirk, flicking a piece of corn with my fork. “Was Rich’s mama and daddy your classmates too?”
“Mhmm.” She hums, looking away. “They were.”
There’s a time in her life that she always seems to gloss over when we talk.
Supposedly nothing significant happened during that time except for Grandma succumbing to kidney failure and Mama moving out to Pearland with Tony.
Aunt Faye always tiptoes over the details from those years with terse responses.
So I divide her life into two parts: life before me and Uncle Kenny, and life after.
Rich and his parents must’ve existed in that time before us.
I side-eye her like she’s been doing me as she takes a gulp of her Diet Coke.
I’ve been so busy wallowing in my crap that I haven’t noticed how different her deep-set eyes look. They’re sullen with dark circles that I won’t dare point out.
“You sure everything was good at his place?” she asks again, pulling the glass from her lips, then pushing away from the table.
“Oh my God. Yes. Why?”
“Well, I texted him and asked how the house turned out…” She lets the silence linger between us as she picks up her plate and cup and walks them over to the sink, dropping them inside it.
“You texted him…and?” I drag my finger across the top of my hand where Rich thumped it.
Maybe if I stroke it enough, I’ll teleport back to his kitchen so I can have a do-over.
I can tell him to keep his raggedy ass hands to himself because things like that aren’t supposed to confuse my already fuzzy brain.
His voice shouldn’t have made heat cloak my body, and his touch shouldn’t have made my nipples pucker against my bra.
Uncle Kenny was right. I shouldn’t have gone over there.
“He says you left a pile of laundry in his room, the baseboards were still dirty, and you forgot to clean the toilets,” Aunt Faye rushes out.
“Huh?”
She looks over her shoulder at me. “He said—”
“I heard you and I…I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“I’m just telling you what he to—”
“Tell him to send you pictures then.”
She raises her eyebrows. “So you’re saying he’s lying? I’ve never asked a client to send me pictures of what I did wrong, and I’ve never had any complaints from Rich.”
Heat sneaks up my neck, and I drop my fork. “First of all, his baseboards weren’t even freaking dirty, and he didn’t even have any laundry for me to wash. What did he want? For me to pull stuff out of my—”
Oh.
I close my mouth.
I think he might be twisting my memories like AJ did sometimes—telling me something happened when I know it didn’t all because I messed with his stuff.
I shake my head, rubbing my hot neck. “I thought he barely talked?”
“Yeah, to Kenny.” She shrugs. “Me and Rich talk all the time.”
“Since when?”
“He’s my client, Lovie. We gotta’ communicate some way.”
“Oh yeah, because he pays you, right? You’re letting Uncle Kenny and these projects take over your life again.”
She rolls her eyes. “Why would I lie about him paying me? You can’t leave his house any way you want just because of some preconceived notion you have about him.”
There’s something about Rich that changed things around here. Aunt Faye has never worked in the Bottoms, she’s never taken a job from any guy who trained at Worthing, and as long as I’ve been alive she’s never walked around with dark circles.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks like I’m the insane one.
She turns her entire body around this time, leaning against the sink like she did yesterday. Her eyes brush my bandaged nails, then the rest of my body.
“I told you I was.”
She folds her arms and looks at the floor, then the rest of what she’s been trying to say comes out.
“You showed up with nothing but the clothes on your back, and you expect me to keep playing dumb? You got a different phone and a new phone number…and your nails, Lovie. Look at your nails. What the hell is going on?”
I can’t say it out loud because I can’t have her looking at me like the security guard outside of the Liberty Tower did, like the cop from New Year’s Eve, or like Blake did when I climbed into his backseat with a bloody face.
I don’t want to hear that same strain of disappointment in her voice that only comes out when she talks about Mama.
“Is he cheating again?” she asks more bluntly than usual. “Because you know my motto about cheaters. You said you could deal with the possibility of infidelity again when you said yes to his proposal afterward.”
A hunk of mashed potatoes almost hurls up my throat, but I swallow it back down with a grimace. Oddly enough, I think AJ’s side chick was right about being the one with the most sense out of the two of us when she subbed me on Twitter once.
“No,” I choke out. “He’s not cheating again. I just can’t come visit?”
“Not in this condition you can’t.” Her eyes brush my broken fingernails then stop on my wild curls that I stopped bothering to swirl into a bun while cleaning my last toilet.
“You sure you called AJ since you’ve been here?” she asks, squinting.
“Yes.”
“And what did he say about this?”
“About what?”
“This…this…”
She doesn’t even know what to call it, and I don’t either. Me and Yesenia decided there’s not a label that exists that can encompass all we’ve been through in the name of “love.”
Finally, she gives up on searching for the right words and points at me. “Something’s going on, but I ain’t gonna force it out of you. Anytime I tried to do that with your mama…”
She blows out a breath, shaking her head.
It’s clear neither AJ nor Blake has called her or Uncle Kenny. He’s been radio silent, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. He’s never been this quiet.
“I think you should go to Terrica’s tomorrow. I’ll drop you off,” she says.
“No…I need to go take care of what I missed at Rich’s. I did it. I need to fix it. And you said you’ve been crazy busy. So let me help out.”
“Kenny ain’t gon’ let me send you over there twice. Once was enough. I’ll go take care of it,” she replies.
I toss my hands up. “I don’t need y’all’s permission to go to somebody’s house.”
And I just need to feel in control of something again.
Plus, I need that do-over with Rich. I need to practice all the boundary-setting with men that Yessenia said she was learning to do this time in therapy.
I’ve been fucked over enough, I don’t need another man barging into my life trying to lord over it with lies and manipulation all because I accidentally broke something of his.
I have to learn how to put my foot down again.
Aunt Faye puffs her cheeks out. “You don’t need our permission, but it’s the principle. Kenny really doesn’t know Rich.”
“But you do,” I add slowly. “You said yourself that his parents were your classmates and that he’s a …a respectable man.”
I study her, but suddenly she’s perfected the art of the poker face.
“I’ll fix what I messed up, then catch an Uber to Terrica’s after. I’ll be in and out—believe me, I don’t want to stay any longer than I need to.” I scoff, stabbing my fork back into the mashed potatoes.