Chapter 16
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
LOVIE
I don’t remember any man ever holding me like a baby—not Tony, not Uncle Kenny, not AJ, or any of the random guys I called myself dating. But cradling me comes to Rich as naturally as breathing does.
My body fits in his arms as if they were designed for the sole purpose of holding it. He rocks me back and forth and up and down as if I weigh nothing.
“Shhh…” he whispers.
I don’t know what he’s shushing me for because I’m not screaming.
I’m not even bawling. I’m just hanging in his arms with my mouth gaping open, trying to inhale the air outside of Beatrice’s stuffy house.
I need it after peeking through the crack in Calvin’s door to make sure he was still alive and heartbroken, sweeping Beatrice’s never-ending hallway, and shooing Tamryn away from the back door before I pushed my way outside.
“Pup…” somebody whispers.
I try to answer back even though they’re not talking to me.
I just need to tell somebody else that I saw Rich’s foot smash into Wendell’s face. I even heard the sharp crack after his heel landed on Wendell’s nose. It sounded like AJ’s knuckles crashing into the side of my head, and Tony’s shoulder ramming into our bathroom door.
“She gon’ be alright?” they whisper again.
I think it’s Tamryn’s little rasp of a voice, but I can’t hear it over somebody’s loud wails in the distance. They won’t shut up long enough for me to listen closer and decide if it’s her.
“Yeah…” Rich replies, patting me on my butt like Mama used to. “She okay.”
He twists around with me dangling from his arms, but I can’t see anything except a blur of trees.
“Don’t worry. You just go back in, a’ight?”
“But I think she’s hurt.”
“She good—just a lil’ spooked, that’s all. I’ll take care of her. Go back in and check on your grandma. Tell her I’ll get this backyard cleaned up soon.”
The wailing drowns out some of their words.
“Pup?” they whisper again.
“Yeah, Tamryn?”
“Thank you.”
A door slams in the distance, and I clamber up Rich’s arms while the howls grow louder.
“Fuck,” he hisses. “Fuck, I should’ve made you go home.”
No!
It’s the only word I want to say, but it doesn’t come out of my mouth like I want it to because I’m living inside my head. I only ever came here when AJ forgot I was his number one girl, or when Tony forgot I came from him. I can’t feel anything when I’m here.
“C’mon, Slim,” Rich mutters. “You gotta stop hollering, mama.”
Me?
Hollering?
I open my mouth to tell him it’s impossible I’m making all this noise, but nothing comes out except a silent choke that hurts.
Sweat prickles my hairline and drifts down the small of my back as the denim fabric of my dress squeezes every part of my aching body.
My clusterfuck of emotions is back. I can’t differentiate between mad, sad, shame, or disgust. It’s all just a big ball that exploded out of my mouth while I dangled from Rich’s arms and now he knows another one of my secrets.
“Shhh…I get it. I understand. I been scared before too.”
It’s something no other man has bothered to tell me when I’ve gone off the deep end. His words are infantile yet validating. They feel like a cool splash of water on my overactive brain while I stare up at the city’s lights darting into the night sky.
We land against something solid, and the earthy smell of grass clings to my nose. Our bodies slide down until that earthy smell grows stronger.
“Shhh…” His hands roam against my body.
I can’t make out what he’s doing. I just feel his rough hands pressed in odd places until the zipper on one of my boots purrs and the cool night air brushes against my shin.
He digs his fingers inside, wiggling my foot out and rolling my sock down.
He does the same to my other foot until the night air sneaks between my sweaty toes and makes me tear my eyes from the sky while choking out a gasp.
“You! You…you—”
“What I do?” He swipes his calloused hand over my face and down my lips.
“His…his…face! You did that!”
“Uh-huh. I did, baby. I did…” he replies gingerly, like I’m a toddler who tripped and skinned their knee.
I think the term of endearment might’ve slipped out of his mouth by mistake, but somehow it softens the ugly images I have of Wendell’s bloody body sprinting out of Beatrice’s backyard. AJ never called me “baby.” It was always some lazy variation like “bae.”
“I ain’t…I ain’t kill him, though…” Rich stammers. “I ain’t kill him.”
But I think he was going to…until he heard me on the back porch.
There was no regretful dip in his perfect eyebrows as he stood over Wendell with eyes blacker than the night sky, and for the first time since we met, he looked exactly like that chilling picture Uncle Kenny had painted of fighters.
I try to blink away my blurry vision as he shifts my body around again, being careful not to disturb my sore rib.
“I’d never disrespect B’s house in that way or…or you or Tamryn. Never,” he murmurs, grabbing my chin and twisting my face toward his. “So ain’t no need for all this.”
The blurriness in my eyes drifts off like fog clearing from a warm window and his face appears right in front of me. A stream of blood oozes over his bulging bottom lip while his chest rises and falls against my back in harsh spasms.
“So you would’ve done it if you were somewhere else then?” I finally choke out. “Somewhere like Lucky’s?”
I don’t know why I care so much, but there’s a part of me that needs to poke another hole in that dark bubble that surrounds him.
I need to know if he’s capable of the one thing I can’t even fix my mouth to say out loud.
It’s the thing that AJ used to keep me in check—the thing Tony gave Mama so he could have her forever.
The crickets’ quiet chirps intermingle with the loud breaths rushing through my nose as he blinks at me under the moonlight. I follow its glow until I find his bloody hand sitting on my stomach and his legs splayed out around my sore body.
I gurgle out a hiccup. “Are you gonna answer me?”
“Even if I was somewhere else—somewhere like Lucky’s, I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have killed him.”
I wait for my tense shoulders to droop from the satisfaction of his answer, but they stay hiked up to my ears at the way that word bellowed out of his mouth.
It replays in my head and dances with Wendell’s screams. I can still hear remnants of his voice bouncing around in my head like I’d hear Mama’s after her and Tony fought.
“Melo Barnes?” I grate out. “Wendell said he was Melo Barnes’ brother. Is that true?”
I cut my eyes at Beatrice’s gate that swings in the wind then look back at him. He swipes his bloody lip against his shoulder instead of answering.
“What trouble did you get into with Melo Barnes, Rich?”
“I ain’t get in any trouble.”
“But Wendell said you haven’t learned—”
“Bullshit,” he mutters. “He said a bunch of bullshit to get in your head, because that’s what men do. They manipulate women.”
“But he said you weren’t—”
“It’s all bullshit. Fuck Melo and fuck Wendell.”
“Rich,” I hiss. “Don’t say that.”
“Fuck. Them. Lovie. Don’t no man around here put fear in my heart.”
His voice is hard, but it makes me push my body closer into his. The dangerous rasp that clings to it makes my heart gallop, and deep down I know he’s not like Zaire, Legend, or EJ. He’s not running from living up to his namesake at Lucky’s. He has to be crashing into something seedier.
I gulp. “I thought you didn’t have a heart, Tin Man?”
He snorts out a low laugh.
I swallow the rest of my questions about Wendell and Melo while Rich’s wet fingers sneak underneath the collar of my dress.
They knead circles into my skin then push my collar down until my faded Target bra pops out.
He pulls me to him, and the skin to skin contact makes a quiet sigh sneak out of my mouth.
“Who taught you how to do that?” I murmur.
“How to do what?”
“The way you held me earlier. Who taught you how to do that?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Oddly enough, I believe most of the things you say. So tell me.”
It’s his eyes. They never veer from mine when we talk. In fact, they chase them—like he wants to be sure I know that every word he says is the God’s honest truth.
“I…I can’t,” he mumbles.
“But I need your voice. I need you to talk to me right now.”
I suck in a breath and look out over the little creek that flows behind Beatrice’s backyard.
It’s the same one that runs behind his house toward the dead end of Joliet before it trickles down into Crestwood Bayou.
I try to drown out the sound of Wendell’s yelling in my head by focusing on the soft rippling of the murky water.
“My big sister, Arnez, taught me.”
Finally.
I didn’t have to pretend I knew who Arnez was anymore. He was poking a hole in that dark, mysterious bubble for me.
“She used to hold me like that because I was scared of the rain,” he says. “This was back when I was smaller than her—back when I was a lil’ runt.”
“You were scared of the rain?”
“Yeahhh, Slim. I used to be so scared I’d run and hide in her bed as soon as I heard thunder rumbling. I’d crawl under the covers with her and she’d pull me up on her and rock me.” He huffs. “Up and down and side to side…”
“But what about your mama? Where was she?”
“Oh, she was around.”
“But?”
“But there’s some things she’s always loved more than me and it ain’t nothing wrong with that.”
“It is, but I’ll mind my business. Your dad already thinks I’m some naive loser who sees the world through rose-colored glasses.”
He chuckles.
“How long did you hide in Arnez’s bed?”
“Until Senior caught me one night.”