Chapter 23 #2
“Good. Now answer my question. Do you belong to me?”
“Yes. You know I do. Now can I go back and finish ordering my drink?”
Forty-eight hours later and her answer is still the same—even while she’s annoyed and craving nasty ass overpriced coffee. This time she even put more bass behind her answer.
I close my eyes as my heart starts that stuttering again. “When I’m done talking to you, you can go back and get your drink.”
“‘Kay…”
Her heavy breaths tickle my ears while I try to calm my wild ass heart and make my stiff dick stand down.
Tact, Pup.
Use tact.
“Remember when I taught you how to get what you want from me?” I ask.
“Yea…yeah.”
“So how you do it then?”
“I open my mouth and tell you what I want, and you’ll give it to me.”
“So do it. Tell me what you want from me.”
The line grows quiet, and that long line of people she described yaps in the background.
“Slim…”
“I don’t want you to touch Beatrice…or Rasheeda…or that other girl anymore,” she blurts. “And I don’t want them to touch you either.”
My dick jumps.
“Then I won’t, but I can’t control what another person does. All I can control is me and my response.”
“So what will your response be if they try to touch you, Rich?”
“That I got a friend now and she don’t want me fucking other women.
Go get your drink and keep sending me those voice messages so I can keep up with you today.
I don’t have no problem following your rules.
” I sit forward, pressing the button to kill my truck’s engine.
“You see how easy it is to control a man?”
I hang up while my chest rises and falls like I just finished running a marathon when all I did was bicker with Slim on the phone about some shit that shouldn’t even matter. I even have a runner’s high, and I ain’t even run anywhere.
Getting rid of a hard dick that Slim caused ain’t the same as getting rid of one from any other woman. Hers still hung around after I hung up the phone and got out of my truck.
On my walk up to Beatrice’s front porch, I have to concentrate on silly shit like her coneflowers that need pruning and the loud sputtering from DeRay’s lawnmower until my dick finally realizes that Slim is across town in some coffee shop instead of at home, in my bed, where I want her.
As soon as I climb the steps to the porch, Tamryn grins from her seat.
“It’s Tuesday,” she chirps, chewing the straw from her Capri-Sun.
“I know what day it is.”
“Just making sure. I know how y’all brains be. Sometimes Mr. Joe thinks it’s 2008, and he needs to go out to get gas for the generator before the storm hits.”
I snort out a laugh while she kicks her feet onto a box of adult diapers.
“Why you ain’t at school?”
She shrugs, staring out into the yard. “Ain’t wanna go.”
“B let you stay home?”
“After what happened with you and Wendell, she ain’t trippin about a lot. She said I don’t even have to go see my daddy this weekend if I don’t want to.”
She lays her head back against the chair, gnawing on the straw and looking out into the yard just like she did the day I brought Slim here.
“What’s on your mind, T?”
She sighs. “People ever say stuff about you that ain’t true?”
“All the time.”
“What you do about it?”
“It depends on who it is.”
“Some of them are my friends and some of ‘em are just random people.” She shrugs.
“Well, anybody who’s supposed to be your friend wouldn’t be saying stuff about you that ain’t true.”
Her brown eyes roll over to mine. “They saying I liked what Wendell was doing to me. Everybody knows about it. There’s a tea page for Wesley on IG and they posted me. They said I tried to steal my grandma’s man. I been friends with Tiana since second grade, and she was in the comments laughing.”
My fingers curl into my palm, and my eyes stroke Tamryn’s baby face. She looks like every bit of the little girl she is and that makes me clench my fist tighter.
“I never even kissed a boy, and the fucked-up part is that Tiana knows that. What you think about that, Pup? You think deep down maybe it’s true? Maybe I liked the attention he gave me.”
I hear Slim’s voice curling into hers. They melt together into a soft medley that makes me drop my hand on top of Tamryn’s frizzy braids.
“I think…” I gulp, trying to force down that medley and find that tact I always struggle with. “No, I know that you just a kid, and he’s a grown-ass man that took advantage of your innocence. Even if you think you liked the attention, that don’t mean what he did was right.”
“Yeah…maybe you’re right. It just sucks ending the semester with no friends.”
“Fuck ‘em. You don’t need ‘em.”
“We all can’t be popular loners like you.” She giggles, looking up at me. “Where your one friend at anyways?”
“What friend?”
“The pretty one.”
My palms get sweaty. “Slim?”
She smiles and nods. “Arnez said she getting married to a football player. She said he plays for the Knights. She looks like a ballplayer’s wife.”
She really doesn’t.
She looks like my “Slim” who had no real experience with men before the worst one came along and smiled at her.
I swipe my hand across Tamryn’s frizzy braids. “Slim is somewhere minding her business like she’s supposed to, and she don’t have a man just like you don’t because—”
“Boys are stupid. I know, Pup.” She laughs.
“Make sure DeRay prune them flowers for your grandma and you take your ass to school tomorrow.”
She sighs from beneath me. “Yes, sir.”
I pull my hand from her head and push the front door open as quietly as I can.
I hold my breath for Beatrice to pop out from a doorway and rush me like she does sometimes after not seeing me for a while.
My heart stutters again like Slim is here—watching and waiting to see how I’ll follow her rules.
“Tamryn?” Beatrice yells from the back of the house.
“It’s me, B!”
“Oh…” Her voice drifts off. “Hold up. Let me finish up with Calvin and I’ll cook you someth—”
“Nah. I’m…I’m good.”
I make a beeline for the hallway and power-walk down it, passing Calvin’s room before she can come out and ask me why I don’t want her cooking. She’s fed and fucked me so many times that Slim’s lil’ jealous ass would probably lose her shit if she ever found out just how many.
Faye’s soft, raspy hum flows out of Senior’s room, and I follow it. It clashes with the blues sneaking out of Calvin’s room, and for the first time since Faye came back into our lives, her humming doesn’t make me feel warm.
I poke my head inside Senior’s doorway.
If I ain’t know any better, I’d think he’d gone to glory with the way he’s got his hands clasped together and his legs stretched out in his bed, but he just sleeps the best when Faye gives him his dose of trazodone. He said Beatrice didn’t do it like she did it.
Arnez sits at the foot of his bed, staring at Faye’s back.
She looks like she did when we had our first and only family meeting in our living room back on Joliet. She had just turned six and wanted to know why Faye was still in our house and sleeping in her spot in Senior’s bed six months after she showed up on our porch.
Twenty-four years later, her arms are crossed just as tight as she sits at the end of Senior’s bed and stares at Faye writing out the important dates on the Harley-Davidson calendar Smitty tacked on the wall.
She rolls her eyes. “He goes to see Lucky on Thursdays—not Wednesdays.”
Faye stops humming and glances over her shoulder. “Well, it’s a permanent marker, Toots. I can’t erase it.”
Arnez huffs.
There’s not much to keep up with since Senior stopped his medications and physical therapy. Now, it’s just all the shit he hates—birthdays, deaths, and the occasional check-up with Dr. Borrowitz to make sure he ain’t withering away any faster than they first predicted.
I tap my knuckles against the doorframe. “I can take him tomorrow. Ain’t no problem.”
They whip their heads toward me at the same time.
Arnez sucks her teeth. “Or she can just follow the previous months like she’s been doing and stop trying to fill it out from memory.
You’re supposed to change my oil tomorrow—not drive Daddy way out to Cypress to shoot the shit with Lucky for however long.
If you do that, my oil most likely won’t get changed and the whole day will be all messed up. ”
Faye folds her lips under her teeth, letting out a strained laugh. “I doubt your engine will explode if Rich gets to it a day later than usual.”
“How do you know that? Your husband’s a boxer, not a mechanic.”
“Arnez…” I walk inside.
“What?”
“You being disrespectful.”
“I’m telling her that what she’s writing on Daddy’s calendar ain’t right. That’s not being disrespectful—it’s speaking up.” Her leg jumps up and down against her purse that’s resting next to the bed.
It’s some expensive purse Jamari bought her when they first started talking that somehow hasn’t made it into the trash despite all the shit he put her through.
“You always told me I should speak up when something isn’t right,” she says.
“I meant about serious stuff—not about a silly date on a calendar. I just paid the school a thousand dollars so they wouldn’t drop you for non-payment. Why you ain’t on campus?”
“It’s college. We don’t sit in a classroom for eight hours a day, genius.
And I’m thirty years old. I don’t wanna hang on campus with a bunch of kids.
So I come and sit with Daddy on Tuesdays before my 12:30 class starts.
It used to just be him and me, but ever since you started training with Kenny, we can never seem to get any alone time. ”
Faye narrows her eyes at her before turning back to the calendar.
It’s Jamari again.