Chapter 19
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
LOVIE
“Faye ‘nem feed you dinner before you ran off?” Rich asks, glancing down at the blunt he’s rolling on his kitchen counter next to the stove.
His cool granite island soothes my ass while I sit in the same spot he plopped me in before he went to take a shower.
There were no explicit instructions as he picked me up from his couch and carried me to the kitchen.
There was just a tiny grunt that escaped his mouth, followed by a firm “stay.” So I did it, with my legs swinging back and forth, and my eyes set on his closed bedroom door until he reappeared in more clothes that I’ll have to talk to Rasheeda about one day.
Did she know he looked the best barefoot with sweats hanging off his tapered waist? He wasn’t even wearing a pair of boxer briefs to keep them from falling, so every so often he tugged them up. Did she know about that ragged, barely stapled-together cut that stretched across his stomach?
I sigh, staring at it.
And did she know he lied sometimes, too? He said he wasn’t strict, but he wouldn’t even let me watch him wash the paint and dirt from his body even though I begged him with my eyes because I’ve decided that bayou boys might be my type despite what Terrica proclaimed.
I cock my head to the side.
His lat muscles flex as he dusts a few crumbs of weed from his fingers and screws the lid back onto his new mason jar. “You heard me? They feed you over there?”
“I could’ve bought that jar, you know?” I blurt. “I have the money in my purse.”
He glances over his shoulder, bringing the open tobacco leaf to his mouth with a smirk. “Mhmm. That’s nice, baby, but I asked if you ate, not if you could afford a jar from the dollar store. I know you got money in your purse. You told me you needed it and I put it there like I’m supposed to.”
See what I mean?
There’s a big possibility that bayou boys are my type.
No other men rolled blunts like they did, built stuff, or called me “baby” so easily that it felt like they simply hummed out my name.
Maybe the term of endearment came out of his mouth by mistake again?
After fighting at Lucky’s and messing around with Smitty and that ramp, his words came out slower, his movements were more sluggish, and there was no way he meant to say such a soft thing again.
His tongue sneaks from between his lips, wetting the edges of the tobacco leaf.
I snort to myself.
Bayou boys even make rolling a blunt look posh with their furrowed eyebrows, pinky finger hanging in the air, and quick tucking and folding.
“You gon’ answer my question? Them folks feed you, baby?” he asks, yanking a drawer open, pulling a lighter out, and sparking the blunt with so much ease that it makes me squeeze my thighs to quell that pounding between my legs.
Yeah…that “baby” was on purpose.
“I cooked spaghetti for Uncle Kenny and Aunt Faye.”
He takes a toke of the blunt with his eyebrow raised. “But did you eat any of it?”
“No,” I rasp, looking away.
“‘Kay. Then we gonna eat.”
“We?”
“Yeah. Me…and you. What, you don’t wanna eat with me?”
“No…it’s just—it kind of hurts when I do that,” I babble out for the first time since I came home.
It hurt so bad that I couldn’t even remember the last meal I ate in its entirety, and Aunt Faye and Uncle Kenny were too caught up in that “biological thing” to ask why I had thrown away an entire bowl of spaghetti.
Rich pushes off the counter and saunters toward the refrigerator. “It ain’t gon’ hurt when you do it with me.”
It’s a perfect answer that lingers on top of the hot layer of want floating between us. It kisses my confession and quells the silly shame that tries to push its way out of that clusterfuck in the pit of my stomach because Rich despises shame. He’d probably beat its ass if he could.
He yanks open the refrigerator and pulls out a foil-covered plate. Whatever’s hiding underneath the foil smells better than any spaghetti I could throw together, and the plate is packed with care like it was made with him in mind.
I smirk. “Beatrice?”
“Nah. Pup. I’m self-sufficient. B ain’t thinking about me as much as you think she is,” he murmurs, pulling the foil off the salmon and asparagus, yanking the microwave door open and sticking it inside.
“Well, if she isn’t, then why’d you take care of that problem she had so easily last weekend?”
I tiptoe around Wendell’s name this time while he closes the microwave door and presses its buttons.
“Because it ain’t no man of the house at B’s or most of the other houses around here. It’s just women tryna make it.” He shrugs. “And my ole’ man always said if they call I better answer, but I better not stay on the line for too long. So she called, I answered, and I got my ass off that line.”
That soft groan I held in the first time we met in his kitchen tries to bellow out.
Uncle Kenny just didn’t get it.
I stare at the puckered, stapled cut on his gorgeous rectus abdominis that I missed staring at. “Does it hurt?”
He follows my eyes, then smirks. “Shit, ain’t nothing gonna hurt in about ten minutes, nosy ass.”
“I’m not being nosy.”
The microwave dings.
He pulls the door open and takes the steaming plate out. “Oh yeah. I forgot you curious.”
“Mhmm. It’s healthy.”
“I’d like to disagree. What’d I tell you about all the curious cats I knew?” He sits the steaming plate of food next to me.
I choke out a loud guffaw. “My Textiles professor used to tell us that as long as we stay curious about the world, we’ll always create our best work. He’d always end every lecture with, ‘Stay curious. It’s healthy.’”
“That must’ve been how New York got lucky, huh? You must’ve been curious about football players at Lockwood instead of learning. Is that what happened?”
I chuckle to myself. “But I’m always the nosy, lame one?”
“I got Lovie Sinclair sitting on my kitchen counter wearing her first design of sophomore year and some no-name stilettos that make her ass sit up perfect while New York somewhere fumbling footballs.”
He looks at me, smirking. “Fuck I look like?”
I toss my head back, holding in another groan and staring up at his stark white ceiling. “I’m not answering that.”
“Yeah, you just don’t wanna stutter out a lie. You already know—I’m daddy bird. We don’t gotta be nosy. We know everything,” he coos.
We howl out laughs until mine simmers into a snort. “Actually, I wasn’t curious about football players at all…until he smiled at me on the quad while I was rushing to the cafe for Taco Tuesday.”
“And then you tried to stab him like you did me, right?”
I giggle as his smell dances up my nose, intermingling with the mouthwatering scent of our dinner. I feel him now. His body heat hovers between my legs.
“No, Rich. I smiled back because it was the polite thing to do, and the next time he saw me, he asked me for my number. He said I made him like Texas.”
“And you fell for that corny shit?” He digs his fingers into my side, then drags them down and pulls me to the edge of the island by my belt loops. “You gon’ get enough of smiling at corny men.”
“And you’re gonna get enough of sleeping with selfish women who don’t think about you as much as they should.”
He doesn’t blurt out a comeback. Instead, a comfortable silence lingers between us, and his body heat disappears from between my legs. The soft sounds of drawers sliding open and silverware clanking fills the lull.
“A couple months back, B said she wanted a constant,” he says, slamming a drawer closed.
“She said she wanted somebody her age—not some young fighting nigga who wasn’t gon’ live long enough to see love through.
So she said she wanted to make shit work with Wendell after he got out the pen because she’s known him for so long, and as a man I know what that means.
It ain’t hurt me none, though. It’s her life. ”
“And what did it mean?”
He huffs out a quiet laugh. “She was limiting my access—”
“But you can still fuck her if you want to, right?”
He howls out a loud laugh this time. “Man, what the hell was they teaching you at them schools?”
“Life taught me that, not school.” I smirk.
“Mhmm. Anyways…she figured it was gonna be easy with Wendell because he was familiar.”
“Hm, but she didn’t consider all the subtle pedophilic red flags he gave off that she probably ignored, huh?”
He chuckles.
I finally pull my eyes from the ceiling and find him standing in front of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s I didn’t even hear him pull out his cabinet.
I savor his confession and this new annoyance I have for Beatrice while he unscrews the top of the bottle and pours the liquor into a glass instead of one of those god-awful plastic cups.
“And Rasheeda? What about her?” I ask as he turns around, sauntering back to me.
His warm body falls back between my legs.
“Rasheeda?” he hums, bringing the glass up to his lips with the blunt still tucked between his fingers. “Rasheeda…”
“Y’all are probably around the same age, huh?”
He stares at me over the rim of the glass, taking a sip. “We are.”
“Y’all probably went to Wesley together, and she probably had a crush on you back then?”
He takes another sip, shrugging. “She did always used to pick me to marry when we played Fuck, Marry, Kill in the back of math class.”
I double over laughing, ignoring the sharp pain in my side. “She wishes.”
“Ooh you a jealous and nosy lil’ something, huh?”
I roll my eyes. “You know she likes the idea of you more than she actually likes you, right?”
He pulls the glass from his lips and smirks.
“Because she doesn’t really know you—the real you.
The you who’s scared of the rain, the you who doesn’t celebrate your birthday because you weren’t taught to, the you who likes Mr. Copeland’s German chocolate cakes,” I blurt, looking at his hard abs.
“Deep down she just wants an inherently good man with clout to prove everybody who ever said she couldn’t get one, wrong.
It’s an ego thing—some silly high school fantasy she’s fulfilling. ”