Juliet

Chapter 16 #2

I turn around and catch the light from the moon reflecting on his bloody mouth as he smiles.

“He snatched me out of her bed and dragged me through the house with Arnez on his heels, hollering and screaming. She followed us all the way to the front door. When we got there—he looked at her, looked at me, then opened the door and tossed my ass right outside and shut it.”

I hold in my gasp.

Somehow I can picture Rich’s memory as if I were there. I see his stoic dad, the horror on Rich’s baby face, and I hear his sister’s screams intermingling with the rumbling thunder even though I’ve never met her. It’s like I’ve lived in his head before. I guess I really can see him too.

“You ever been out in a storm by yourself in the middle of the night?” he asks.

“I have.”

“So then you should know how scary that shit is, huh?”

I did.

I know what it’s like to flail around in the dark with nowhere to go—nobody to run to—nobody who cared enough to pull me into the light.

“What your dad did is cruel, you know that, right?”

It was abuse, but I really need to mind my business.

“The first rule of breaking a fighter is to take him off the tit and make him stand on his own. You can’t wean him off, though. Gotta go cold turkey. If you don’t, he’ll always try to run back and latch on. He’ll always chase that coddling. He was doing what he had to do to make me a man.”

“Make you a man?” I scoff. “At how old?”

“Seven…”

The gasp comes barreling out my mouth this time. It makes him snake his hands around my waist and plop me onto his lap.

“Aw, don’t start that,” he mutters.

I think I fit best in his lap.

Here, I feel his heart beating against my back, his firm dick nudging my ass, and I’m drowning in that rosemary and oakmoss scent that makes me question how I can still sit comfortably in his arms after the bad things I saw him do.

“I survived. See.” He stretches his arm out, twisting it around, letting the moonlight shine on the ink etched on his skin and the deep scars embedded underneath it. “I’m here.”

“But your dad—”

“Made me a man.”

“At seven…your dad made you a man at seven. That’s probably how old Ky is.”

I think I hate Senior, or maybe I’m just climbing on my high horse like Aunt Faye says I do when I think I know other people’s lives better than they do.

Rich picks me up again and readjusts my limp body. “I told you that Ky is just a baby—”

“And you weren’t? A seven-year-old is a seven-year-old no matter who the person is. It’s all wrong. Period.”

“Lovie…” he warns.

“Rich?”

“Let me talk.”

I focus on gulping in a mouthful of air so I won’t obsess over my hard nipples that are still begging for him—especially after hearing those sharp words come out of his mouth.

There’s a firmness embedded in his voice that makes me climb right off my high horse and wait for him to tell me how wrong my assumptions are.

He reaches up, pushing at my headband again, nudging it back into its rightful place and murmuring, “Some boys are born to fight and some are born to just be. Ky was born to just be, and Rasheeda needs to accept that.”

“He’s a soft boy, huh? That’s the real reason you won’t teach him how to fight. That’s why you won’t take him to Lucky’s.”

“Yeah… and ain’t nothing wrong with that, no matter what anybody says. You understand?”

I nod. “Will your sons fight?”

“I wouldn’t know ‘cause I ain’t having none.”

“So you want to be a girl-dad?”

“I don’t wanna be no kid’s daddy.”

“Does Rasheeda know that?” I ask, resting my head against his shoulder and staring up into the sky.

He tugs me closer, cocooning me in his arms. “Every woman I fuck knows what I am. I ain’t for forever, so ain’t no use in thinking about love and babies.”

“Because you were raised on survival, right?”

He snorts out a laugh, swiping his cheek against my wet one. “I leave you alone with my ole’ man for a few minutes and he already corrupting your sweet brain?”

“But is it true, though?”

“You don’t need to worry about none of that or any of that dumb shit Wendell was talking about. You worry about yourself. Put yourself back together like you told me you were gonna do.”

I try to wrap my brain around his words, but I can’t because I’m on my high horse again and Aunt Faye says that sometimes when I’m up there, I get selfish.

But it’s the only way I can grapple with the gaping hole in my chest from not being able to see Rich take care of his own baby or the thought of him not existing one day.

I shake my head, following an airplane that sails through the sky until the back door creaks open. I shuffle against him to turn around, but he holds me still.

“Your food in the microwave, Pup!” Tamryn yells. “Grandma wanna know if your lil’ friend wanna eat?”

I scoff to myself, shaking my head.

“Nah. She straight, T!” he yells back.

“A’ight! Let me know when you ready to eat. I’ll heat it up.”

The door slams shut, and I’m grateful for his answer because I can’t go back in there. If I do, I’ll throw up everything I saw and heard tonight right on Beatrice’s wood floors.

“So what’d he say?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Wendell. What did he have to sa—”

“I ain’t ask. I ain’t the judge or the jury or nothing like that, you know what I’m sayin? I’m ju—”

“Just a stupid man. I know,” I garble out, twisting around in his lap and finally reaching out to touch a part of him.

I drop my fingers on his head, raking them across his coarse waves, being careful not to disturb their pattern as the water in the creek ripples toward Crestwood Bayou.

“Is it my turn now?” he asks.

“For?”

“You asked me so many questions I lost count. This is reciprocal, remember?”

“Yeah.” I snort. “I remember.”

He taps my bruised side. “So how’d he do it?”

I sigh. “He did exactly what you said I should never let a man do.”

The words tumble out of my mouth with ease and the low hum he lets out makes me scoot closer into him until he grabs my sides to hold me still.

“It happened in our closet.”

My body grows stiff as if I’m back in our closet in New York, stumbling into AJ’s coats as he stalks toward me. I hold my breath, waiting for Rich to say something. Instead, his head lolls to the side, and he stares at me while my fingers slide against his hair.

No man has ever been this quiet after asking me a question. They always have a rebuttal, a disinterested gaze, or did their best to contort my words to make them fit their own agenda, but they’ve never given me the space to just keep talking.

“It was my fault. I knew what would set him off, and I did it anyway. I asked him why he was coming home at three in the morning when I could only leave the apartment to do the things he felt I needed to do to keep him satisfied with me—like get my nails done because he hates them bare, get a wax because a bush disgusts him, or a silk press because my curls are too much.” My eyes glaze over with more tears that won’t fall.

“I think people have it in their heads that it’s always something complicated that starts it, but it’s always the tiniest thing—a look, a comment, the wrong move, the wrong question.

After that, it’s like a chain reaction, and before you know it, you’re picking yourself up off the floor wondering how you learned to take a foot to the rib from a grown man. ”

He hums softly in response.

“I feel stupid for what I’m about to say…but that kick was the last straw. I left a week later. I walked right out of our front door with just the clothes on my back.”

Crickets chirp and the water ripples while my ugly confession hangs in the air.

“Are you gonna say anything?” I ask.

He blinks at me with a smirk, shaking his head.

“Why not?”

“Why you care what I have to say? It’s your story.”

“I…I don’t know. It just feels weird recounting it all to you and not hearing a response.”

He glances at my hand, covering it with his and squeezing my fingers into a ball.

“The next time you ball your fist up, don’t stop to ask a man what he’s thinking before you hit him—just lift it up and bury the motherfucka.

Bury it right in his mouth so he’ll never make you assume you should stop telling your story to hear his. Be selfish and make him pay.”

“But what if I want to hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Hear what this man thinks about my life before he found me in his kitchen?”

He chuckles, flashing his bloody teeth. “Shit, I think it was beautiful—even the ugly parts. But what do I know? I’m just a stupid ass man that hates another stupid ass man for teaching you how to take a foot to the rib.”

He folds his bottom lip under his teeth.

It’s twice the size it was when we were at Worthing, and now I want to taste it more than I want to taste his gums. His mouth relaxes and it pops from under his teeth like it knows what I’m thinking.

He smirks, pushing his finger against my nose and nudging my face back. “If I ain’t know any better, I’d think you was tryna give me another one of those birthday gifts you was telling me about.”

I suck in a gasp.

The scent of the blood emanating from his lip makes saliva creep from all its hiding places in my mouth and my head nods in the most immature way.

“You sure I deserve another gift from you?” he asks.

“I…I think so.”

He laughs, and the moonlight casts a warm glow on his face as he wraps his fingers around my chin. “You wanna taste me? Is that why you keep following me around?”

“Yes.”

I stare at his bloody mouth in wonder until his calloused fingers slip from my chin to my throat in a way that makes wetness leak back into my panties.

He keeps a firm but gentle hold around my neck as if he wants to make sure I won’t sneak out of his grasp and do something crazy… like kiss him without warning.

“‘Kay,” he mutters. “But this the last gift I’m taking from you. A’ight?”

I nod like some lovesick teenage girl kissing her crush for the first time, but I’m really just a grown-ass woman who can’t remember what it’s like to want to taste a man.

I lean forward, pressing my lips against Rich’s swollen ones, and an embarrassing groan shoots out of my throat. I peck his lips once and then again, inhaling him.

He tastes like those words I read in that pamphlet Yesenia gave me. No, actually, he tastes better—like metal, warm Honey Buns, and the first gulp of Texas air I breathed in outside the airport.

His chest vibrates as he laughs at the way my tongue sneaks inside his mouth and glides along his gums, lapping up the wetness I’ve been wanting. He presses his fingers into my throat so gently that I lean into them.

“Slim…” he whispers, pulling away while I chase his mouth. “Don’t do that…”

I purr out a low moan.

“Please don’t do that,” he mumbles, shaking his head and nudging me away by my throat.

I gasp out, “Why no—”

Oh.

My eyes widen as I catch his low, undisturbed ones.

I feel why.

I glance down and find his dick pushing against his fleece shorts—hard, long, and unwavering. As soon as I reach for it, he nudges my hand away. If I didn’t want to touch it so bad I’d giggle at his soft scolding, but it’s clearly begging for me, though. So I reach for it again.

“Nuh-uh,” he grunts, knocking my fingers away, and pressing his lips to mine. “Stop that.”

His free hand sneaks underneath my dress, gripping my ass cheeks with so much force that my legs spread around his and my knees sink into the prickling grass.

He pulls me up onto his stomach while slurping my tongue into his mouth, and I finally taste it all—the rough stitches sitting against the inside of his cheek and the open gash from his fight with Wendell.

“Mhmm…” I moan, trying my best to swallow all of him.

He gives my tongue a long suck that makes me dig my fingernails into his biceps. A loud moan jolts out of me as he pulls his mouth from mine and plants it right in the crook of my neck above his fingers. He kisses me there and my toes curl.

We breathe hard until he pulls his face from my neck and rasps out, “Don’t.”

I blink. “Wait. What?”

“Don’t come looking for me again.”

“Bu—”

He gently pulls me back to him by my throat, letting his lips brush mine.

“Don’t,” he murmurs against them. “Tell me you won’t.”

“I…I won’t.”

“Even if I’m being stupid and ask for you again, right?”

I nod, accepting another moist peck from him. “Ye…yeah.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he whispers, laying another kiss against my lips.

“But—”

His lips smash into mine again.

“Ri—”

They come again and leave so fast that I clamber against him to catch at least one and keep it, but he still has his hand around my throat, and I’m so dizzy from his smell, taste, and control that I feel drunk.

“Rich,” I whine, clawing at his chest. “Wait. But you said—”

He pulls me to him, plunging his tongue inside my mouth. As soon as I wrap my lips around it, he pulls away, and I must be drunk for real. It’s the only way I can explain the frustrated tears coating my eyes. I just want one last taste of him—just one.

“Listen, you the tough one out of us, a’ight?” he whispers. “Not me. I’m the weak one. You came home to put yourself back together, so that’s what you need to do—not follow me around or…or try to be friends with me. Friends get you in trouble, remember?”

Before I can argue back, he pulls me to him and presses his lips against my cheek. “No more crying. Ain’t nothing for you to be crying about.”

I nod, choking out a huff. “Happy birthday, Pup.”