Chapter 14
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
LOVIE
I think Teddy Pendergrass is haunting me.
Last week he made fun of me in Rich’s kitchen for losing my last fight with AJ.
Now he’s just playing in a wistful loop in one of the rooms along Beatrice’s hallway while I try to figure out how Rich forces me to wade through my clusterfuck of emotions and pinpoint each one.
First it was shock, then it was loneliness, and now there’s a new one percolating from my chest to the pit of my stomach after meeting Beatrice.
It sat inside of me like a heavy bowling ball while she talked about Mama and Tony and laid her hand against Rich like she owned him when Rasheeda didn’t.
Her fixation was written in her smoky grey eyes when she turned around and saw me standing next to him in her kitchen, or it could just be that strange feeling spreading throughout my body and making me believe things that aren’t really true.
Rich tightens his calloused hand around the back of my neck, forcing us to a stop in front of one of the closed doors in the hallway before murmuring out, “You gon’ let my ole’ man take care of you for a few minutes?”
My nipples pucker against my bra.
He’s not my type.
He’s not my type.
He’s not my type.
Rich Lovelace is really not my type.
God, I shouldn’t even have a type right now. I’m supposed to be putting myself back together.
It’s like a mantra I have to keep telling myself ever since he walked over to his truck at Worthing and yanked the passenger door open after I told him I didn’t want to go home.
“Where’re you going?” I choke out in a low whisper.
“To chop it up with B’s friend real quick,” he coos back in a natural rhythm. “You gon’ sit tight with my ole’ man while I do that?”
“Yeah…yeah,” I pant out in a voice that I don’t recognize as my own.
It’s dripping with piping hot heat that singed my vocal cords as I pushed the words out, and I’m not too sure why.
He wrinkles his thick eyebrows, tilting his head. “You not tryna leave me, are you?”
“No…no. I’m…I’m gonna sit with your dad while you go talk.”
There’s no more fun banter about him taking me back to Chantilly. It’s like he knows my body wants to curl itself around his but my mind wants me to run.
I should’ve gone home like he kept telling me to.
I should’ve dropped that cake off to him and gone to Terrica’s to apologize.
Truthfully, I can run out of Beatrice’s house right now and forget all of this—forget her, Wendell, and the fact other women thought Tony was perfect before he did what he did.
I can even forget Rich and what he’s about to go do, but my body says I really don’t want to.
He reaches out, scraping his rough thumb along my bottom lip, pulling it from beneath my teeth even though I don’t remember tucking it there. “Your stutter gets worse when you lie.”
It does?
“And then afterward you suck your bottom lip.” He swipes the center of it. “Your mama and daddy knew that?”
I shrug, glancing down at his bare chest and fighting the urge to sneak my tongue out to taste his thumb that’s still lingering on my lip.
“My mama put me in speech therapy a few months before she…before she died because of a little stutter that came out when I talked sometimes,” I whisper. “She didn’t even live long enough to bring me to my first session…”
His Adam’s apple bounces as he swallows. He wants to ask a “Rich question” about Mama and Tony, but I think he can see I can’t say more about them—not even after eighteen years.
“What about New York? He know what you do when you lie?” he asks.
“New York?”
“The ballplayer—the wide receiver—the one everybody around you thinks is so good.”
“I don’t think he ever paid that much attention to how words fell out of my mouth.”
He pulls his thumb away from my lip and I curl my fingers into my hand so they won’t chase his like they did in Beatrice’s kitchen.
“Hmph.” He shakes his head. “Yeah. I forgot he was a fuckin peon.”
Dammit, I felt every morsel of hate intertwined in that insult and for the first time in my life, my mouth and pussy water at the same time for a man like Rich.
He’s not my type.
He’s not my type.
He’s not my type.
He reaches for my neck again, and I try to gulp in some of the savory air slithering from Beatrice’s kitchen while that mantra disappears into the abyss with everything else Rich doesn’t tolerate, like shame and loneliness.
“C’mon,” he says, gently pushing me toward the last open door in the hallway.
I lean into his hand to savor its hardness before he snatches it away again. I try to memorize the calluses and scars that decorate it so I can have them later in the privacy of my bedroom.
When we get near his dad’s doorway, he holds me in front of him like a human shield and taps his fingers against the doorframe.
I hold my breath, waiting for Senior to turn his head and excitedly beckon us into his room because his son had made it to his thirtieth year on this god-forsaken planet, but he doesn’t do any of that.
Instead, he sits up straight in his wheelchair, staring at the moving image of a fireplace crackling on the mounted flatscreen on his bedroom wall while his fingers shake against the armrest.
Rich drags the rough pads of his fingers across my neck in lazy circles while I try to fight through that nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Jesus, does anybody remember what day it is?
“Man, why you ain’t out on the porch?” Rich asks, pulling his hand from my neck and placing it at the small of my back.
He nudges me, and I take a step forward until he places both hands on my hips and walks us inside. I’m caged between his heavy arms so there’s no way I can take off now, but I’m okay with it.
I glance around the large bedroom.
Senior is loved.
It’s in his neatly made full-sized bed, the Harley-Davidson calendar on the wall with notes scribbled onto different days, and in the bleachy scent that lingers inside his room.
He finally grunts. “My last cigarette was a month ago. Go on the…the…porch for what?”
“To socialize.”
“Socialize? I see them niggas every day.”
His words drag out in that unnatural, breathy rhythm Rich told me about. It makes me lean in closer to hear him.
Rich pushes us forward again until we stop in front of the empty chair sitting underneath the TV. He lets my waist go while I study his dad.
Senior is a mammoth of a man, just like his son is, but he’s so thin his cheekbones poke out. I’d say he’s beautiful, but that word is too boring to describe the scar that zigzags across his symmetrical face and the brightness of his golden skin. He looks too young to be confined to a wheelchair.
He holds his shaky finger up, pointing it at me with a neutral expression.
“I brought you somebody pretty to look at,” Rich replies to his gesture. “I found her in the kitchen last week.”
A shudder courses through my body as Rich rakes his fingers through my hair and pushes my headband back again. “She like to follow me around.”
Senior smirks, dragging his finger from me to Rich as if he’s trying to wag it.
It stops on Rich. “She for you?”
My mouth waters again.
“Nah. She don’t like dirty lil’ bayou boys. She like pretty boys like her aunt likes.” Rich snorts, placing his hand on my shoulder and nudging me down into the chair. “This Faye’s niece.”
Senior smiles, exposing perfect, stark white teeth. “Oh yeah? Faye-Baby’s niece, huh?”
“Yup,” Rich replies.
“I still remember when she got that call from her sister talking about she was pregnant. Time sure do fly, huh?”
That heavy bowling ball of whatever the fuck rolls through my stomach.
I think Aunt Faye lied again.
She said her and Rich’s mama and daddy were classmates, but I don’t think they were. Beatrice didn’t even mention them when she reminisced about their high school days.
The truth is in Senior’s placid eyes as they stroke my face and in the cutesy nickname he rasped out: Faye-Baby. Uncle Kenny only ever calls Aunt Faye “sweetie.”
“Tell him your name, Slim. Your real name,” Rich says.
“Lovie,” I rasp, waiting for his touch again.
Rich hooks his hands on the back of the chair, sliding his fingers behind me, and my shoulders droop from the contact.
“That’s a pretty name, huh?” Rich asks.
Senior smiles in amusement, then nods.
“Tell my ole’ man where you graduated from.”
I swear I almost hear a silent “baby” lingering at the end of his words like he’s bragging on me to my future father-in-law even though I have nothing to show from my time in school except fancy pieces of framed parchment paper hanging in Aunt Faye and Uncle Kenny’s living room.
“I graduated from Rhodes…and then Lockwood.”
“Smart?” Senior purses his lips, nodding.
“Oh yeah,” Rich replies, pulling his fingers from behind me and squatting next to the chair. “Be careful throwing that word around, though—she insecure about her nerdiness.”
My face grows hot as they laugh, and Rich looks up at me. “You gonna stay here—right, mama?”
“Ye…yeah.”
Shit.
I pinch my eyes shut just as he shakes his head at me with a smirk. Afterward, he swipes his thumb across my bottom lip, picking up the moisture my tongue left.
I open my eyes to him staring at me.
“Curiosity never brought nothing good to none of the cats I know,” he mumbles. “Stay.”
My eyes scrape against his biceps as he pulls his thumb away from my mouth, and that “Bayou Boy” teases me from his arm.
Senior’s eyes burn the side of my face as Rich pushes up and walks out of the room.
I follow his back until he disappears into the hallway.
Even after he’s gone, I stare at the doorway as if he’ll change his mind about talking with Wendell and stay with us, but I don’t think that’s how Rich’s brain works.
“He’ll come back.”
I look away from the empty doorway and find Senior pointing toward the hallway.
“Is he gonna come back looking the same as he did when he left?” I ask.