Chapter 22 #2
We’ve been here before with Wendell, but back then Rich and I were practically strangers, but now he’s seen me naked…and heard me moan his name out… and I’m in too deep to not do whatever he says.
So I grab my bag, crawling over the middle console until I land in his hard lap. He wraps his arm around my waist and the icy feeling of metal glides across my wrist.
My eyes jolt down.
He had snuck that intimidating black gun out of his middle console when I wasn’t looking and his finger hugs the trigger while his warm arm hugs my waist.
“You nervous, but you got a gun? How that make sense?” Rich asks him.
I narrow my eyes at the boy’s body until I see the bulge in the waist of his jeans that I missed.
“On my mama—it ain’t even loaded. I swear to God, man.” He yanks up the bottom of his hoodie, exposing his white T-shirt and the tops of his boxer briefs where the butt of a gun pokes out.
A car’s headlights flash on his round cheeks and soft features as it barrels past us through the intersection.
“Rich…” I mutter. “I…I think he’s just a teenager. He looks young.”
“Yeah, a teenager with a gun.”
“Man, I ain’t never even used it before. I swear,” he pleads, putting his arms back in the air. “I promise you—I don’t want no trouble with you, Pup.”
His arms tremble while he stands still even though Rich isn’t pointing his gun at him.
“Rich…just put it up. Put the gun up.” I gulp.
“Shhh,” he coos under his breath. “Look…”
I glance at the gun tucked into his hand. He swipes his finger over a tiny lever on the gun’s body, revealing a sliver of red.
“It’s just like an on and off switch,” he mutters. “It’s off now.”
The lady rests her arms against the driver’s side window as if she’s a casual spectator of our late-night drama. She’s so close that I smell a hint of whatever tart liquor is in her cup. It sits on top of her gourmand-scented perfume.
“I…I swear I ain’t see your mama, I swear I ain’t mean to walk up on your girl like that,” the boy stammers. “I swear.”
My mouth goes dry.
Mama?
Girl?
I take a deep swallow to quell the sticky dryness, and my eyes roam to LaTanya, who’s still resting against the side of the truck with her eyebrows raised. Now I see Rich in her full lips and the richness of her deep skin that I’m seeing up close for the first time. God, he looks just like her.
“Miss…” the boy rasps.
I stare at LaTanya’s lips and wait for her to say something to him, but she points past me instead.
I turn my head and the boy stares at me with his bushy eyebrows furrowed as another car drives by, honking. “Miss, I apologize. Can you please explain to him I was just distracted?”
Rich looks down at me while LaTanya takes a sip from her cup. I lean forward until Rich presses his hand into my stomach, signaling that I had moved far enough.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Lorenzo,” he rushes out, staring at Rich’s gun. “I been watching Pup fight since I was a boy.”
“Okay…it’s okay.” I turn toward Rich, looking into his eyes that are that knee-buckling coal-black color again. “You hear that? He’s been watching you fight…since…since he was a boy.”
“Yeah…” Lorenzo butts in, pushing the arm of his hoodie up and exposing a cast on his left hand.
“I wanna get in the pit since I’m sixteen now.
I got a fracture the other day sparring with Joel’s son down on Pine.
You should see that nigga’s face. I beat his ass even with my hand all twisted up like they say you did to Benny back in the day—you know back when Lucky used to let y’all get it in before the big boys fought—before everything got fucked up. ”
I lay my hand on top of Rich’s, peeling his finger from the gun’s trigger while my heart gallops. He lets me slide it from under his hand and sit it on top of the middle console.
I turn, brushing my hand across his cheek as he swallows while staring at Lorenzo drop his arms. “He’s a boy, Rich. He’s only sixteen. That’s it. He doesn’t need you to see him as anything else but a boy right now. It was an accident.”
His dark eyes finally soften.
“She sayin I shouldn’t bust your ass for driving through here like that just because you a lil’ boy.” His deep voice vibrates against my back.
Lorenzo smacks his lips. “No offense, Miss, but I came out the womb with big nuts. Ain’t no lil’ boy in me—never been.”
Rich laughs, then LaTanya laughs, but I can’t because I see too much innocence left in his green eyes—I see too much of Rich in them.
“So you saying I’mma see you in the pit before I hit the dirt?” Rich asks.
Lorenzo’s cheeks bunch up and he nods. “Hell yeah. I might even be the one to put you in the dirt.”
Rich belts out a laugh that makes him pull me closer and wrap his arm around my neck. “I want you to remember that shit when you see me down at Lucky’s, nigga.”
“I’m puttin belt to ass, unc!” Lorenzo laughs nervously, lowering his shoulders and taking a step back.
“And I put fists to mouths, nephew.”
Lorenzo flashes a relieved smile at me before turning and walking the last few steps back to his running car.
“Hey, Lorenzo!” Rich calls out.
He looks over his shoulder with his fingers dangling from the driver’s side door handle.
“You can’t put me in the dirt if you beat me to it. Go home.”
“I got you, Pup.”
He flings the door open and gets back into the car, pulling away from the intersection at a snail’s pace until he’s so far down Bayou Bend that his car’s lights disappear.
“They gon’ kill somebody at this intersection one of these days,” LaTanya rasps.
Her voice sounds as if it can soothe the deepest cut. Hearing it makes me glance down at Rich’s clothes I’m wearing, and my mouth twists at the way I’m sitting in the center of his lap while my smell lingers in the short hairs of his goatee.
God, what an uncouth way to meet his mama for the first time.
I look back up at her, even though I don’t want to.
Her dark eyes stroke my face and she smiles, exposing a mouth full of teeth that are almost as straight and white as Rich’s.
“Hi, sweet-face,” she says.
“Hi…” I murmur with hot cheeks.
She smirks, looking over at Rich. “Finally made a friend, huh?”
“Yeah…after weeks of chasing and begging, she finally said I can be her friend. Ain’t that some shit, La?”
She looks back at me, and her bloodshot eyes soften as if she knows it was me doing all the chasing and begging for her son.
She reaches out, plucking his necklace by its sparkling Cuban link chain. “I guess you don’t need this anymore then, huh?”
“You gave him that?” I rasp.
“Uh-huh. Then did six months in the county for writing bad checks, but it was worth the thirty thousand in restitution and two years of probation.” She chuckles, her words slurring. “The jeweler said it was a good gift to give to a lil’ boy who doesn’t get to see his mama much.”
There’s an unspoken agreement floating between her and Rich that feels like it’s been festering since she draped the necklace over his head, and I want to climb on my high horse and point fingers and make judgements, but I can’t because of the sparkle that glimmers in Rich’s eyes as he looks at her.
“Yeah,” I say. “It…it is. It’s perfect—just like he is. You did good.”
“I told him as long as he had it around his neck, he’d never be lonely.
Wearing it meant I was with him and keeping him company even when I wasn’t around, but it ain’t never stopped him from coming out here and looking for me.
His daddy said if I was a halfway decent mama, he’d shonuff be a mama’s boy and them mama’s boys be the hardest ones to break.
” She puts a hand on her jutting hip bone, rolling her eyes. “What you want tonight, Pup?”
He glances over at me with a smirk. “Just forty-five minutes of your time. Lovie wanna get you a patty melt and put some money in your pocket. Is that alright with you?”