Juliet

Chapter 8 #2

We ain’t best friends, but as long as she’s with me, she’s mine to take care of regardless of how we feel about each other.

Her chin dips down, and she looks away from me.

“So why can’t you break up with him?” I ask, keeping my finger on the lock button.

Neither of us is going anywhere until I get an answer because I don’t wanna hear her business from somebody else again. I only wanna hear it from her.

“Why do you even care?” she asks.

I don’t.

At least, I don’t think I do, but my brain keeps telling me I should feel one way while my mouth says some other shit.

I shrug. “Because I guess I really am just as nosy as you are. So, why can’t you break up with him?”

Her eyes dart to mine and she lets out a deep breath before rasping out, “I can’t say why.”

“What the hell you mean you ‘can’t say why’?”

She scoffs, yanking at the door handle again.

I shake my head.

Arnez huffed out that same sound when I questioned her about her ex, Jamari. She said I needed to learn tact, but Senior ain’t raise us up on that soft ass shit.

“Tact, Pup—learn it! Don’t fuckin run up on me and ask me something in a way that makes me feel like trash! Especially when deep down you already know the answer to your stupid ass question!” she gasped.

I swallow a choke.

Oh.

Slim’s ballplayer is a bitch.

That’s why she can’t say “why” and that’s why she can’t break up with him—at least not in the honorable way she deserves to. He’s that thing she’s running from—that thing I keep catching glimpses of when I get too close to her. He’s the reason she’s scared of me.

“So you be hittin that nigga back or what?” I hum out, making her whiskey-colored eyes grow.

“Excuse me?”

I press the lock again, and she jumps at the loud clank. I look away, shaking my head.

Tact…Pup. Use tact.

“When that nigga be hittin on you, do you feel brave enough to ball your fist up and hit his ass the fuck back for having the nerve to put his hands on you?”

It ain’t pretty or proper like the words that come out of her mouth, but I can’t help it because I’m desperate to know something that ain’t even my business.

Her top lip quivers like a baby’s, and it takes a minute for me to understand that her quivering lip is her answer to my question.

“That’s why you couldn’t say anything to him before you left him,” I reply. “You scared of him.”

“I never said that.”

“You ain’t have to.”

It’s in her words, expressions, and actions. It’s all over her.

She tosses her hands up. “You’re putting words in my mouth. I never said any of that. You can’t just…just say stuff like that.”

I shove the gearshift into park. “Get out.”

“Huh?”

“Get out,” I repeat, yanking off my seatbelt. “I wanna talk to you and I can’t do it up in here.”

I climb out, walk around the truck, and yank the passenger door open. She looks ahead at the creek with her chest rising and falling as if she’s trying to catch her breath.

“C’mon,” I mumble.

This ain’t the type of conversation to have in a restricted area. She needs to breathe in the outside air, and she needs space in case she feels like she needs to run away from me again. I get it even though I don’t wanna get it.

“Get out,” I grunt.

She looks over at me until I crook my finger at her like I did back at the house. It makes her turn her body and slide down the side of the truck until her sneakers touch the ground.

I step back. “Close the door.”

She grabs the door, eases in front of it, and pushes her back against it until it clicks into place. Afterward, she stares at me with uneasiness in her eyes.

I point to the left side of her body that she keeps conveniently keeping her weight off of. “If I’m wrong about him, then show me and I’ll shut up.”

She scoffs. “I am not lifting my shirt for you. Have you lost your mind?”

Yeah, because I already know what’s there.

I can see parts of her that nobody else can, even though I ain’t ask for it to be this way. She’s just easy to see for some reason.

“Kenny know?” I ask.

She tugs at her shirt and looks down at the creek while I study her deep dimples up close.

“No,” she finally replies.

“Faye?”

She shakes her head.

I suck in a breath and look off in the same direction toward the creek. We probably look stupid as hell talking to each other this way, but I guess this is the aftermath of one of those “tact” situations.

“Does anybody know?” I ask.

“Nobody who actually matters here,” she mumbles.

“You gon’ tell them?”

“Tell them what, Rich?” she asks in a strained voice, wrinkling her arched eyebrows.

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her say my name, and I can’t even enjoy it because it’s wrapped in contempt now that I know her quiet secret. Arnez said admitting that secret out loud for the first time was one of the worst things she’s ever done.

“Okay, fine. So where he at then?” I ask.

She stares down at the loose gravel and garbles out a barely audible, “I don’t know.”

“What you mean you don’t know where he at?”

She flings her head up. “You know, this really isn’t any of your business. You don’t know anything about me or…or my ex and our relationship.”

She wants to touch me.

She wants to jab her finger in my chest and do all the emotional shit that women do when they argue, but she can’t because he took that power away from her.

I reach down and grab her soft hand, uncurling her fingers from the ball they’re in.

Her body goes stiff like it did yesterday, but she doesn’t run this time. She lets me pull her warm hand up and slap it against my chest.

“What’re you doing?” she rasps, letting it fall back to her side.

I pick it up again and pry her pointer finger apart from her other bandaged fingers.

I stab it into my chest and hold it there. “That’s where it’s supposed to be in case you forgot. Now what else I do to piss you off?”

She balls her face up and looks away, shaking her head.

“Look at me,” I grunt. “Look me in my face and tell me what else I did to piss you off.”

She shakes her head again and, fuck, if I ain’t tired of that shit, but Arnez always says you have to be patient with women like her and I think Slim might be just like Arnez.

“You…you just know stuff that you shouldn’t,” she utters, staring at the ground. “And I don’t like it.”

She sounds like Ky trying to explain to Rasheeda why he won’t eat broccoli. There’s nothing complicated behind her explanation. It’s like she’s run out of ways of expressing herself.

“Then why won’t you look me in the eye and tell me that?” I ask.

“Because I can’t!” she yelps, lifting her hands up. “I…I just can’t. Alright?”

Man, that ballplayer is something else.

He’s still living inside of her from however many miles away in New York, but that’s how men like him are. It’s like they fuse their brains to their women’s brains, and it’s almost impossible to pull them apart.

I swipe my moist hands down the sides of my shorts to stop them from reaching out for her.

“Look at me,” I mutter.

She shakes her head as a lanky egret waddles from the creek and through the brush at the end of the road.

Her eyes follow its white body. I stoop to her level, and our eyes meet just as it flies toward the sky.

She tries to look away from me, but every time her eyes dart one way, mine follow them until she’s got no choice but to look into them.

“I don’t hit women,” I whisper matter-of-factly.

“I pay their bills when they can’t. I feed them and their kids when they’re hungry.

I listen to them complain about their niggas.

And I fuck them when they’re lonely. But I don’t hit ‘em. So ain’t no reason for you to be scared of me. You understand?”

Her body goes stiff until she nods, and my shoulders droop like it’s me hiding from some stupid man that can’t keep his hands to himself.

“This the first time you left?” I ask.

I shouldn’t have asked that either, but it came out like every other question comes out with her. They just slide out no matter how bad I want them to stay in.

“No, but it’s the first time I got away.”

My stomach tightens.

“So does he know where you at?” I ask.

“Maybe. It wasn’t very smart of me to come back home. The agency that helped me was trying to send me off to Colorado because of who he is and the access he has, but I don’t know anybody there and I couldn’t do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“Be somewhere else alone because of him. So I…I came home to put myself back together.”

It all pours out of her mouth in a garble like he’d taken his time and broken her into little bitty pieces.

“So what you gon’ do?” I ask.

“About what?”

“When he comes back into your life while you putting yourself back together?”

She shakes her head. “I did the one thing he said I couldn’t do—I left. I think he’s done with me. He has Kenny and Faye’s numbers, and he hasn’t even bothered to call.”

“Men like him don’t just let women like you get up and walk away to ‘put yourselves back together’ after they break you, but I think you know that.”

She belts out a bitter laugh. “You don’t believe in sugarcoating anything, do you?”

“Ain’t no use in pouring sugar over shit.”

She laughs again, swiping a stray tear from her cheek with her shoulder. “Faye said that all the time when I was little. She told you that before or something?”

“Nah…my ole’ man did.”

She pinches her eyes shut. “I don’t even get a ‘congratulations on leaving’ or…or a ‘you did the right thing’?”

I shrug. “If that’s what you want, I’ll give you that.”

“Why do I feel like your dad says that too?”

“Because he does.”

She laughs, eyeing the road.

I wanna tell her they only say that shit on TV and in movies. In the real world, folks were gonna blame her for every bad thing that ballplayer ever did to her.

She scoffs and her eyes veer down. “So what else did your dad tell you?”

“To never let a man back you in a corner,” I mutter, stepping away from her and leaving a foot of space between us. “You ever heard that one?”

Her bottom lip trembles again, and I get it.

I stripped her down to nothing because I still haven’t learned tact. She might as well be standing naked underneath me.

She shakes her head. “I never thought I’d be in a situation where I’d have to think of something like that.”

I take a step forward again, and she tries to take one back. She pushes her body into the passenger door, and gravel crunches underneath her shoe as her foot slides against it.

I stop.

I don’t even have to ask her to know she’s been backed into hundreds of corners before.

“You gonna tell me how to get out?” she mutters.

“I don’t teach self-defense or none of that frilly shit them white folks teach up at the rec center. Maybe that’s where you oughta go.”

All I know is what I taught Arnez last summer when she met Jamari in the parking lot outside of Jazzy’s Bar, but I’m already in enough shit from teaching her that.

“Oh yeah? That same rec center you sent Ky to?” she asks. “What’s next? Are you gonna give me that generic advice you gave him? You’re gonna tell me to ‘walk with my head up’ and send me on my way too?”

“What was I supposed to tell him? He’s a baby—a baby that ain’t mine.”

She tosses her hands up. “Jesus, I don’t know. At least teach him how to throw a damn jab so he can defend himself. You’re a…a freaking boxer or trying to be one.”

I shake my head, snorting. “I ain’t a boxer.”

“Then what are you?”

“I’m just a man—a stupid ass man.”

A ragged breath shakes her body, and she swipes another wild tear from her cheek, like she knows this is it. This is the beginning and end for us, and it happened right here on Joliet.

“I’m supposed to be at my friend Terrica’s,” she utters. “She has a shop over in the Commons. You can drop me off over there.”